Creation Care:Issues & Challenges

Today

Howard A. SnyderAsbury Theological Seminary

October 25, 2013

How We Got Here . . .

Long history of appreciation for, and debates about, “Nature.”

Initial awakening: 1960s and 1970s

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

Conservation MovementBrief conjunction of Left & Right –EPA, Clean Air Act (1970)Endangered Species Act (1973)

Brief theological / ethical ecological awakening.

Herman Daly and others.

How We Got Here . . .

Ecological awakening undercutAnd neutralized by OPEC oil embargo Iran crisis Changes in U.S. politics.

Recent decades: Discovery of human-induced climate change (global warming, etc.) Strong contrarian business & political reaction.

Where we are today . . .

Beginning of environmental awakening among Evangelicals.

Gridlock due to conjunction of short-sighted politics and bad theology.

Growing pressure from the effects of climate change and related issues.

Other big issues: deforestation, ocean pollution, species depletion (declining biodiversity), etc.

THE CHALLENGE

Think ecologically about it! (Mindset.)

Interrelationships / Feedbacks

Cycles of life & death

“You can

never

do just one thing.”

(Ecological insight)

“Remember the i

mportance of small things

done at the right ti

me.”

(Amish farmer in

Pennsylvania)

Think local & global —

that is, think:

Very local and specific —

Area and region —

State, nation, hemisphere —

Global

Some of the best examples, models, and initiatives are probably outside the U.S.

Think networks. Networks are and can be organic. Think ecosystems.

SPECIFIC CHALLENGES for seminaries:

1. Visible, public evidence that creation care is being taken seriously.

2. Finding ways to engage faculty, curricula, programs, administrators, constituencies.

3. Exploring the interface between

Scripture

theology

history

discipleship

the various disciplines

Exploring the interface between

curriculum and creation care.

Examples —

Counseling:

Nature deficit disorder.

Healing benefits of community with nature.

Church life, administration, discipleship:

Role of prayer, other spiritual disciplines

SPECIFIC CHALLENGES for seminaries:

4. Projects that demonstrate the harmony between creation care and sound economics (sustainability).

(Learn from Toyota in Georgetown.)

5. Learning from one another – What works at other institutions? How cooperate?

6. Goal of 0% waste (100% recycling / reuse / multiple use).

Being an energy producer, not just consumer.

A particular theological challenge:

Jesus and the Earth.

Argument:

The Bible is the story of salvation involving God himself, people, and land.

Too often, in our concern for people, we have forgotten God’s concern for the land — the “all things” of God’s good creation.

The Question:

If land is so important in the Bible, why didn’t Jesus say more about it?

(Implicit: If the New Testament doesn’t say much about the earth [and creation care], it must not be very important.)

The Problem:

A long tradition ofdevaluing the earthand spiritualizing salvation in a non-biblical way.

(I analyze reasons for this in Salvation Means Creation Healed.)

Examples —

John Calvin:

“This is the wonderful exchange which . . . [God] has made with us; that, becoming Son of Man with us, he has made us sons of God with him; that, by his descent to earth, he has prepared an ascent to heaven for us; that, by taking on our mortality, he has conferred his immortality upon us . . . .”

Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.7.15.

Examples —

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758):

The physical world, though glorious and beautiful, is only an “imitation of the superior, the material of the spiritual.” Thus the material world is “nothing but a type of what is spiritual.”

Images or Shadows of Divine Things.

John Stott: The call of Abraham included “promisesof a seed and a land.” Through “successivefulfillments” this promise expands, and now“is being fulfilled through the mission ofthe church.”

But strangely, Stott then focuses only on “seed” and not “land,” saying the promise of seed “will be fulfilled in the great company of the redeemed in heaven.”

Initially Stott emphasizes both seed and land, but then land disappears, despite N.T. promises. Typical.

Through the Bible Through the Year, 46.

This is the “Christian worldview” we have inherited!

Our problem is not the New Testament — it is an unbiblical, dualistic hermeneutic.

What is the answer?

Four responses:

1. The New Testament assumes and incorporates the Old Testament revelation.

2. Key references to land and earth in the New Testament.

3. The all things theme in the New Testament.

4. The decisive fact of Jesus’ incarnate life and resurrection.

I.

The New Testament assumes and incorporates the Old

Testament revelation.

The key fact is fulfillment — understood not as a transition from the material to the spiritual, but as the complete fulfillment of all the O.T. promises of the flourishing of the land (shalom) and God’s people

through Jesus Christ.

Jesus:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” (Mt. 5:17)

This fulfillment of the O.T. promises is to be understood with the same physical literalness of Jesus’ incarnation and resurrection . . .

. . . and Jesus’ promise to return to earth to restore all things, the “restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets.” (Acts 3:21)

. . . Not according to a hermeneutic alien to Scripture!

The work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in bringing New Creation —a coherent Trinitarian drama.

II.

Specific references to land and earth in the New Testament.

Approximately 200 references to land or earth in the New Testament with (naturally) a wide variety of meanings.

Four points:

1. The earthiness of the N.T.,especially the Gospels.

It is easy to overlook this physicality, or take it as merely incidental or background:food, clothing, birds, animals, trees, rivers, vines and branches, sheep, harvests . . .

For example:

Matthew 10 — gold, silver, copper, belt, bag, tunic, sandals, staff, food, dust, sheep, wolves, serpents, doves, sparrows, penny, hair, sword, cross, cup of water.

Matthew 21 —donkey, colt, cloaks, road, branches, trees, tables, doves, fig tree, fruit, mountain, sea, vineyard, fence, wine press, watchtower, produce, stone.

[Jesus] was in the wilderness for forty days,

being tempted by Satan.

And he was with the wild animals.

And the angels ministered to him. (Mark 1.13)

Richard Bauckham: Given Mark’s economy of words, the order here is not accidental.

Satan: Enemy to be resisted.Animals: “enemies of whom Jesus

makes friends.”Angels: “Natural friends of the

righteous.”

“Mark’s image of Jesus with the wild animals can be retrieved as the christological warrant for and symbol of [the] possibility, given in creation, given back in messianic redemption. It is a symbol. It does not constitute an ethic of animal rights. But since it is precisely the modern demythologizing of nature that has turned it into a mere object of human use and exploitation, our need is very much for religious symbols of the human relationship to nature.”

Richard Bauckham, Living with Other Creatures (2011), 132.

Note how easily the physicalbecomes invisible to us

as we read the New Testament.

2. Jesus’ words.

“The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head” (Mark 4:28)

“Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt. 6:10)

“I have glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:4)

The point:

Jesus took the earth much more importantly and literally than we perhaps give him credit for!

No basis for dualism.

Jesus’ worldview was biblically ecological, not Platonic or dualistic.

3. Jesus’ commission to the church.

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8)

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (Mt. 5:5).

Both these have rich O.T. and thus eschatological meaning.

4. The promise of new heavens and earth.

This is more explicit in other N.T. writings, but is implicit in Jesus’ life and teachings.

Jesus came to fulfill all the O.T. messianic promises.

III.

The all things theme in the New Testament.

Thesis:

1. Heaven and Earth in the Old Testament become “all things” (ta panta) in the New.

2. O.T. promises to restore and heal the land become “the reconciliation of all things (ta panta)” in the N.T.

Note that in the Bible “heaven and earth” usually means the whole created order, not two different, incompatible realms or realities.(E.g., Gen. 1:1, 2:1, 2:4; Ps. 113:6; Jer. 10:11; Mt. 5:18; Acts 4:24)

“heaven and earth” “all things”

(Old Testament) (New Testament)

“There is in the OT no uniform, abstract concept of the totality of all things. . . . Instead, the OT uses ‘heaven and earth’” for this comprehensive sense of the created order — the background then of “all things” in the New Testament. (TDNT 5:889-90)

This becomes clear in the Septuagint’s use of ta panta.

I am the LORD, who made all things (panta),who alone stretched out the heavens,who by myself spread out the earth. (Isa. 44:24)

Not like these is the LORD,

the portion of Jacob,for he is the one who formed all things (ta panta). (Jer. 10:16)

. . . by his word all things (panta) hold together. (Sir. 43:26)

Hermeneutical point:

Given this equivalence of “heaven and earth” in the O.T. with “all things” in the New, there is no basis for spiritualizing the gospel meaning of salvation in either its present or ultimate (eschatological) reality.

Of course it is a spiritual reality, but it is a spiritual reality that incorporates the renewal of all things. No dualism or journey from earth to heaven.

Rather, the renewal of heaven and earth — “as the prophets promised long ago.”

Paul is explicit here:

For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, . . .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.

(Col. 1:16-20)

Richard Bauckham on Colossians 1:15-30 —

This passage “impresses on us … the cosmic scope of both creation and reconciliation —through the phrases ‘all creation,’ ‘all things’ (6 times) and the further specification of all things as both visible and invisible, both in heaven and on Earth. The inclusion of the whole created world in both creation and reconciliation could hardly be more emphatically stated. The scope of reconciliation is as wide as the scope of creation.”

Bauckham, The Bible and Ecology (2010), 152

The point:This is consistent with and a further elaboration of what Jesus and the Gospel writers taught.

For example:“The Father loves the Son and has placed all things (panta) in his hands.” (John 3:35)

“All things (ta panta) have been handed over to me by my Father” (Luke 10:22)

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all (panta) to myself.” (John 12:32)

This leads naturally to the final and most important point:

IV.

The decisive fact of Jesus’ incarnate life and

resurrection.

The INCARNATION is the ultimate answer to the question of Jesus and the earth.

”The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

(John 1:14)

Jesus’ earthly LIFE is the ultimate answer to the question of the value and significance of the created order.

(Jesus’ healings and the logic of his parables; his calling of the church, his Body.)

Jesus’ parables are not dualistic — i.e., “earthly stories with a heavenly meaning.”

Rather, they are an affirmation of the unity and interconnection (ecology) of earth and heaven.

“The parables focusing on nature remind us that the realm of the natural and spiritual cannot be dichotomized.… Close association with nature and the observance of the process of nature help us to grasp the depth of the spiritual association it provides and to feel the awe of the miraculous working of God in the realm of the earthly…. In other words, there is a harmony in the rhythms and process of the natural in what we call the spiritual.”

— V. J. John, The Ecological Vision of Jesus (Bangalore, India, 2002), 287-88

(Jonathan Edwards also say harmony, but in a

more dualistic sense.)

Jesus’ RESURRECTION is the ultimate proof and promise and power of the renewal of all creation.

”For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope, 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.” (Rom. 8:19-21)

Romans 8:22 –

“all creation groaning,” “subjected to decay,”(Rom 8:20), but “waiting in eager expectation” for the final liberation, restoration.

Reconciliation with God through the life and work of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit -

Salvation – a Trinitarian drama

Jesus Christ in Fulness —

Incarnation Life - example, teachings,

community Atoning death Resurrection Ongoing reign Return - kingdom of God in

fulness.

Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.

– Luke

24:39

Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. – Heb 2:14–15

Whatever happened to Jesus in the resurrection —

The same thing will happen to us –

and to the whole creation.

“When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

– 1 John 3:2

God intends to redeem people

with their environment, not out of their environment.

“They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.”

‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;the whole earth is full of his glory.’

Creation Care:Issues &

Challenges Today

Howard A. SnyderAsbury Theological Seminary

October 25, 2013