The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he placed the man he had made. The Lord God made all sorts of trees grow up from the ground—trees that were beautiful and that produced delicious fruit (Genesis 2:8-9).
I keep coming back to this passage in my contemplation of the wonder of creation because it seems so fundamental to a biblical theology of nature. To help me think about the meaning of nature, I’ve been plodding through the first book of Alister McGrath’s Scientific Theology: Nature. And I mean plodding! Whew, it’s heavy. Which I suppose you’d expect from a former professor of historical theology at Oxford. I’ve used the New Living Translation version of this Scripture because it sets out so plainly the fact that the first thing said about the trees of the Garden of Eden is that they were beautiful.
In this passage beauty comes before utility (usefulness). Now it’s risky to draw set theological principles merely from order of appearance, so I’d be reluctant to say that the Bible indicates that the beauty of God’s creation is more important than its usefulness. After all, if the created things were not useful, Adam would not have survived!
But just the fact that the concept of beauty comes right in on the heels of God’s declaring the creation “very good” (Genesis 1:31) means to me that as creatures made in God’s image, something resonates within our souls when we come into the presence of something beautiful. So for one attuned to God, the first experience of Yosemite or Yellowstone would likely cause us to pause and reflect, “This is awesomely beautiful,” and not muse, “Wow, think of how much energy we could generate by putting a dam here or building some geothermal power plants here.”
There’s a sense in which the counter-play between beauty and utility seems to reflect our human spiritual and material natures. We have both natures and we need to be sensitive to both. And guiding us in our sensitivity is the reality that the material things we must use are also the handiwork of God and they have inherent goodness. Maintaining the goodness and beauty of material things as we use them ought to be one of our principle aims as His stewards. Think of a lovingly prepared and beautifully presented Thanksgiving meal in comparison to a chicken bucket from Colonel Sanders!
On the subject of beauty McGrath quotes both Augustine and C. S. Lewis (about a 1600-year spread there!) Augustine believed that there was “a natural progression from an admiration of the beautiful things of the world to the worship of the One who created these things, and whose beauty was reflected in them.”
What is beauty? What is it that charms us and attracts us to the things that we love? It must be the grace and loveliness which is inherent in Him; otherwise they would in no way draw us to them.
McGrath points out that Lewis “affirms the existence of beauty within the created order, while simultaneously stressing that beauty is intended to lead the beholder to the origins and ground of that created beauty in the Creator.” I particularly appreciate the quotation of Bonaventure:
The creatures of the world lead the souls of the wise and contemplative to the eternal God, since they are shadows, echoes, and pictures. . . of the productive, exemplary, and order-inducing art [of the Creator]. They are set before us in order that we might know God . . . . Every creature is by its very nature a kind of depiction and likeness of that eternal wisdom.
So my conclusion is that exposing ourselves to and being sensitive to the beauty of the creation is in large part a spiritual endeavor that will draw us toward our Creator. It’s a spiritually fruitful practice that we moderns perform much too rarely. Lewis, however, reminds us in The Weight of Glory to understand that beautiful things are merely hints of what is to come:
[Beautiful things] are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of the worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of the flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.
We are promised in the Word that one day that flower, that tune, and that news will be a reality. In the meanwhile these awesome hints fill us with hope (Romans 8:18-23).



over the animals. This means that animals are ultimately at our mercy—in spite of the fact that for the most part, their Creator takes care of all their needs. Which is good: if we had to feed the animals, for instance, that would be our full-time job! So we are blessed in that the animals are taken care of by God.
The amazing fruitfulness of the earth that provides both for us and for the creatures of the wilderness is a gift from a righteous, gracious, merciful, and loving Creator. As its stewards then, mankind has a divine mandate to preserve its capacity to be fruitful—which involves our being able to determine when human activity begins to go beyond our taking of the fruit of the land and we start destroying its fruitfulness. A part of that work is making certain that we preserve abundant habitat where wild animals can thrive in order that they may do the work their Creator has called them to, just as we do ours.






Michigan state land-use policy decision to move his Chicago-based youth camping program out of Michigan to Wisconsin in 1945. The camp program was conducted for about eight weeks each summer at facilities built in the thirties by the 