The Lord said to Job] “Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place, that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it? The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment. The wicked are denied their light, and their upraised arm is broken [Job 38:12-15].

I was having coffee with my friend Jack this morning, and he told me about taking a cruise through the Alaskan fjords.  One day he was up early and taking in the awe-inspiring view of mountains beginning to stand out in the early morning sun—like folds of a garment.  While he was taking in the beauty of it all, he overheard a conversation between two men nearby.  One of their comments stunned him:  “What in the world is the value of this land; you could never really do anything with it.”

One would hope that Jack’s inner thought would be common to most of us: “Thank God that mankind can’t do anything with it!”  Sometimes I think we’d all like to see God break a few upraised arms of men.

China's Three Gorges Dam

Every generation seems to have what I call a “pride of the present”: we tend to believe that our thinking is sounder and our worldview more informed than the previous one—perhaps even all previous generations.  This is especially apparent in regard to the natural world—which modern science and technology believes it has virtually mastered.  Because nature has been our easy provider, willing patient, and sometimes cadaver for so long, we have tended to lose respect for it.  And what we no longer respect, we can easily come to abuse.

I feel we modern followers of Christ have also become somewhat blind followers of technology and have adopted the same utilitarian view toward God’s good creation that we see in much of science and industry.  This utilitarian approach, however, is really the child of the humanistic “Enlightenment” and the subsequent Industrial Revolution, not of a true understanding of the theology of nature.

Interestingly, two of the most significant Reformers, John Calvin and Martin Luther, had been quite successful in framing a sound biblical theology of nature in the 16th century that corrected the faulty dualistic theology of the Middle Ages that saw the material world as something low and degraded that needed to be escaped from (a view that goes all the way back to Plato and is also foundational to Eastern religions).  Their followers eventually became the champions of the “Protestant work ethic” that in part led to the Industrial Revolution and the ultimate devaluation of the creation that Calvin and Luther had helped to free from mysticism and dualism.  See the Wikipedia article about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

Calvin and Luther both had a high view of the natural world that I think we need to recapture.  I firmly believe we need to trade our pride of the present for humility and an understanding that other generations before us may have had a more biblically sound view of the creation than we do.  I go into depth on that issue in the article “Listening To the Right Voices,” which you can get to by going to the “Articles” button at the top of the page.

To whet your appetite on rethinking how Christians ought to consider the creation, let me drop in a couple quotes on this post that you can also find on this Website under “Creation Quotations”:

From Luther:
“Now if I believe in God’s Son and bear in mind that He became man, all creatures will appear a hundred times more beautiful to me than before.  Then I will properly appreciate the sun, the moon, the stars, trees, apples, pears, as I reflect that he is Lord over and the center of all things.”

From Calvin:

“In every part of the world, in heaven and on earth, he has written and as it were engraven the glory of his power, goodness and eternity…. For all creatures, from the firmament even to the center of the earth, could be witnesses and messengers of his glory to all men, drawing them on to seek him and, having found him, to do him service and honor according to the dignity of a Lord so good, so potent, so wise and everlasting….For the little singing birds sang of God, the animals acclaimed Him, the elements feared and the mountains resounded with Him, the river and springs threw glances toward Him, the grasses and the flowers smiled.”

Because of our generational pride and our loss of sensitivity to the natural world I wonder often if we can ever regain the biblical perspective these influential reformers understood.

Oh, the depth of the riches of the
wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable His judgments,
and His paths beyond tracing out!
“Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been His counselor?”
“Who has ever given to God,
that God should repay him?”
For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.
To Him be the glory forever! Amen.
(Romans 11:33-36)

There are a number of things I don’t understand about the natural world.  Being a child of the Age of Science, this lack of comprehension used to drive me to come up with some all-encompassing explanation for everything.  I felt that I could not rest my faith until all these imponderables were resolved and cataloged in my brain.

I have come to the point now where I believe it is presumtive to think that I should be able to have little more than a glimpse of God’s works and ways—His wondrous mysteries.  I am content to merely celebrate, study, and handle with reverent care the things He has created.

I feel it is prideful for us to believe we will ever, on this side of Glory, have all mysteries revealed to us.  It is the humble and patient Christian who is willing to wait and trust in God that He will provide us the answers—when and if He chooses.  Mankind’s attempt to understand God’s works and ways in the universe will always produce mysteries.  A mystery, after all, is nothing more than evidence that human knowledge is limited and human intelligence finite.

It seems logical for one who believes in an eternal God to also believe that the universe He created would contain some evidence of His eternality (Romans 1:20).  It should not be surprising, then, to learn that mankind’s continual attempts to incorporate into our time and space explanations of the finite physical world all the mysteries of the micro-universe and the macro-universe are often futile (i.e. quantum physics and astrophysics).  It is this fact that makes me hesitant to accept as fully correct even the explanations of Christians in the sciences who are committed to the authority of Scripture.

I don’t think anything in God’s world will ever fit perfectly into any human categories.  And it must grieve God to see His children separate from one another because of disagreements over the interpretation of mysteries they were not intended to fully understand such as the age of the cosmos, the age of the earth, and the development of life on earth.

One of the many negative results of our scientific age is that it has trained the human mind to abhor leaving a mystery a mystery.  We insist on understanding everything.  The danger in this, however, is that when we gain a little understanding, we often claim that the mystery is solved—which is at best not true, and at worst keeps us from actually learning the truth.

Further, I’ve come to believe that in Christianity there is mystery, but no mysticism.  As I understand it, mysticism describes mankind’s attempt to come to an understanding of deity indirectly through some sort of inner human intuition.  Christianity describes God’s giving mankind essential information directly through person-to-person communication.  People, however, are finite while God is infinite; therefore we will always have incomplete knowledge of Him and His works and ways.  So there will always be mysteries; but such mysteries do not obscure the basic facts God has revealed to us, nor do they excuse us from the responsibilities He has given us to care for the creation.

The Apostle Paul’s understanding of the subject of mysteries should be our own: “Oh the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!  How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!” (Rom. 11:33).  I have also read God’s rebuke of Job for thinking he could explain the way God deals with the earth and mankind, and I must parrot Job’s reply: “I am unworthy — how can I reply to you?  I put my hand over my mouth . . . I will say no more”  (Job 40:4-5)

Hand-over-mouth is a gesture we ought to be more accustomed to.

(DNA model source)
(Nebulae photos from the Hubble Telescope site)

The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God (Romans 8:20-21).

C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer in particular have helped me form my view of the meaning of the natural world. And it was Lewis who introduced me to the literary and spiritual mentor who helped him form his view of the creation—among many other views: George MacDonald.

I have used MacDonald’s and Schaeffer’s thought extensively in the articles that reside on this site, but have somewhat ignored Lewis. So today I am going to let “Jack” have a say.

First a little background: I used to be a member of the Audubon Society—in large part in order to receive the always enjoyable Audubon magazine. My membership, of course, also gave me access to the local Society meetings, which I attended for a while. To tell the truth, however, I always left those meetings with a feeling of sadness. I didn’t attend long enough to really develop any significant personal relationships with other members, but the impression I received was that few, if any, were followers of Christ.

All seemed to be thoroughgoing naturalists in the philosophical meaning of that word. Nature provided them with their highest source of joy and practically functioned as their god. And when speakers would come and talk of the decline of this or that bird species or the continuing degradation of the natural world created by careless people, gloom settled on everyone.

If nature is the highest good and you believe that nature is all there is, it’s easy to understand why general depression presses down on you. If there is no hope beyond the material world we live in, the degradation of the earth leads to the degradation of hope.

Here’s how Lewis explained it at the conclusion of chapter nine in his book Miracles:

Only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little away from her, and then turn around and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her.

Come out, look back, and then you will see: this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas [and birds]; this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads. How could you ever have thought this was the ultimate reality? How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as scientists tell us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creature, this ogress, this [saucy girl], this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch.

But the theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. The ‘vanity’ to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence…. We shall still be able to recognize our old enemy, friend, playfellow and foster mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more, herself. And that will be a merry meeting.

That is the joy of hope that resides in the heart of those who serve and love the true and living God. So we are indeed saddened to see the creation degraded and abused and species formed by the design and power of the Creator driven into extinction by our carelessness, greed, and over-consumption. But because we know the Creator and we know the hope that even nature has for its redemption and renewal in the coming Kingdom (Romans 8:18ff), that sadness ought to act as a motivation for us to once again become the stewards of creation we were intended to be.

Francis Schaeffer believed that it should compel us to be involved even before the consummation in a “substantial healing” of all the rifts created by the Fall. It was this truth about the natural world that was in part the motivation for Lewis to write the Narnia series where a perfected natural world in tandem with the lovers of Aslan cooperated to defeat evil. The same understanding also works its way through Lewis’ less popular “Ransom Trilogy”—his three science fiction novels: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

As I write these words, I am sitting at my sister-in-law Shirley’s dining room table looking out on a frozen Manitowaning Bay from her home on Ontario’s Manitoulin Island at the top of Lake Huron.  The sun is shining but is filtered through a haze of snow dust sparkling in the air. 

Nature is in the deep freeze now, but we have God’s promise: spring will come; warmth will return; butterflies and bees will grace our days again. While we wait, though, I’d like to recommend that you read some Lewis books or MacDonald novels to help lift your spirits and remind you of the coming eternal spring. If you haven’t read Lewis’ science fiction series, give it a try—reading them in the order I’ve given above. Lewis again:

Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds, and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be overwhelmed and, after a certain age, nine times out of ten, nothing will happen to you. (The Four Loves, ch. 2, para. 28)

What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no man lives, a desert with no one in it, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen? (Job 38:24-30)

In our condo’s patio area the squirrels are robbing the big sunflower seeds I put out for the cardinals; tufted titmouses (titmice?), nuthatches, and chickadees are trading turns at the feeder; the yew bushes are slumped to the ground again after yesterday’s  one-foot snowfall; our neighbor’s crabapple tree is providing cover for forty-some sparrows, twenty-some juncos, a couple pairs of cardinals, and a few house finches; the golf course behind us is in deep hibernation providing for our eyes a sort of frozen Zen garden; and the snow-laden clouds have grudgingly given way to reveal an almost royal blue sky allowing our star to reflect blinding brightness into unshielded eyes.

This is my place on the earth—the place I’m most intimate with. Since I grew up at the edge of town and spent much of my spare time in pastures, woodlands, and wetlands, I’m probably more broadly aware of the natural aspects of my place than the average person.  Most folks I know likely did not experience falling through pond ice into the mush of a partially submerged muskrat hut and have to walk a half mile home with frozen pant legs clacking against each other and rubbing their legs raw.  So I know that the ice is always thinner around the edges of muskrat huts.  And I also know that inept milking of Ayrshire cattle with impossibly small teats does the same stiffening thing to your pants—besides making them smell terribly sour!  When the wind comes up as it’s supposed to do today, I know enough not to walk under snow-bent conifer boughs unless I am prepared for an avalanche from the overburdened branches.

But who needs that kind of knowledge today?  And what does the lack of such a need have to say about our manner of living and our understanding of the true nature of our places?  Wendell Berry is one who in his writing has taken me further than anyone else in understanding that one cannot really have or understand “community” if the natural world around us is not included in that community—deliberately included, not by necessity or by accident.  Berry writes: “Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed.” Wendell Berry, “The Regional Motive” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 67

If you’ve not discovered the writings of Wendell Berry, but want to treat yourself—and challenge your heart and conscience—begin to familiarize yourself with his works.  Berry is a Christian and biblical in his worldview, though he likely would not claim the designation “evangelical.”  But if we learned only from the works and thoughts of evangelicals—especially in the area of caring for creation and seeing the importance and place of nature in what we call “our community”—we would suffer from an extreme lack of knowledge and understanding.

Below are a couple of articles to start with.

This one will really put the mind and heart into high gear:
Christianity and the Survival of Creation

This is one of my favorites—from Sierra Magazine.  It includes one of the finest articulations of the right to life that I have read, and raised a ruckus with many of the magazine’s pro-choice readers:
The Obligation of Care

Much more can be gleaned from “his” Website.
[Note the disclaimer--that it is the site of his fans, not his.  Berry shuns computers.]

Let me leave you with a quote—one of his more popular poems, and one of my favorites:

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

[Wood drake: E. J. Peiker.  See his wonderful nature photography at his Photos of the Month site]

How many are your works, O LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. There is the sea, vast and spacious,  teeming with creatures beyond number— living things both large and small. There the ships go to and fro, and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there. These all look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you give it to them, they gather it up;  when you open your hand,  they are satisfied with good things. When you hide your face, they are terrified;  when you take away their breath,  they die and return to the dust. When you send your Spirit,  they are created, and you renew the face of the earth. May the glory of the LORD endure forever;  may the LORD rejoice in his works (Psalm 104:24-31).

I was thinking the other day about what we know from Scripture about how the Holy Spirit interacts with the natural world.  We know that from the beginning of creation God the Holy Spirit has been present on the earth.  In the beginning the Spirit “hovered” over the waters. The Hebrew word used there appears only three times in Bible.  The context suggests that the Spirit acted in the creation like the eagle in Deuteronomy 32:11 where the word is used again: The eagle “stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions.” We also know from the passage above that the Spirit continues to act in creation by giving life. It seems from these references that the Spirit is a “pregnant” presence vital to each new life-giving and life-affirming natural act (“pregnant” in this sense meaning “full of creative power”).

Jurgen Moltmann in his book on the Holy Spirit and the theology of life (The Source of Life p. 114) elaborates on this truth and this passage:

Through the force of his Spirit [The Creator] forms the community of creation.  In his Spirit everything comes alive; without his Spirit everything disintegrates.  His eternal Spirit is the driving force and the vital spark in all things.  In everything living the passion for life is dominant—and the fear of death.  That is why everything living cries out for God’s Spirit, in which alone it can live and does not have to die.  What exists and cannot endure longs for the eternal existence of God in which it will have continuance. (Romans 8:18-25)

Further, dramatic appearances of the Holy Spirit are mentioned in the context of two other genesis events: the genesis of Jesus’ ministry at His baptism and the genesis of the Church at Pentecost.

This is both marvelous and mysterious.  Full understanding of it is certainly well beyond me.  But I think we can at least draw this conclusion: God the Holy Spirit is all about life and breath.  It is the Spirit who gives and perpetuates the life of all creation.

Yet here is something more personally compelling: This is the same Spirit who indwells you and me who have been rescued by God the Son–maintaining our physical life and giving us our spiritual life.  It’s my belief, therefore, that as we walk upon the face of the earth, the indwelling Spirit will stir our hearts when we observe and take part in the both the birth and death of living, breathing creatures.  Perhaps that’s the reason that God attends the death even of the sparrow (Luke 12:6-7).

George MacDonald is one of my favorite writers.  He was–through his written works–a mentor to C. S. Lewis.  MacDonald too wondered about the interactions of the Spirit within us and the Spirit outside us.  Here are his thoughts about that:

All about us in earth and air, wherever eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs.  Now it shows itself in a daisy, now in a waft of wind, a cloud, a sunset, and this power holds constant relation with the dark and silent world within us.  The same God who is in us and upon whose tree we are buds, also is all about us.  Inside the Spirit; outside the Word [Jesus, as per John 1:1].  And the two are ever trying to meet in us; and when they meet, the sign without and longing within become one.  The man no more walks in darkness, but in light, knowing where he is going.

It’s my earnest prayer that in my interactions with God’s wonderful creation I will be more and more attentive to the Spirit within and the Word without in order that I truly might know exactly where I am going.

[Fawn photo source: bjmccray]