Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation, by Richard Bauckham

Author: Richard Bauckham. Review by Frank Regan.

Richard Bauckham, a former professor of New Testament Studies, invites us to rediscover our membership of the Community of Creation. This community is larger than the community of humankind. It consists of many species, some extinct, others recently born.

Our author asks how we should read the Bible in an age of ecological disaster. Writers in the early church counselled that, to know God, we must read the Bible alongside the book of nature. Today it is critical.

Bauckham hopes that good science and good theology might combine to produce a more humble, less hubristic relationship with nature and the environment. Until recently only the green movements had sensitivity for what that relationship should be. Our culture and civilisation have been rooted in a spirit of domination. Our artefacts, our structures and our living spaces all point to a civilisation built on a complete ignorance of our kinship with nature. We have plundered and destroyed. There are signs that nature is giving out, its resiliency exhausted. 

Where, when did we lose the plot? The book brings us back to the Renaissance. The author says that ‘Renaissance Man’ [sic] forgot his creatureliness. A new humanism exalted humans in an attempt to free us from our submission to nature, with its whimsical spontaneity, unpredictability and wild exuberance. The human became a god and we forgot how embedded in nature we are; how interdependent with other creatures.

Our author wants us to learn to read the scriptures with a renewed optic, through new lenses. He takes as an example Psalm 104. The God of Psalm 104 is the extravagantly generous giver of all good things. God’s works are manifold in their diversity, both on land and in the sea. God cares for the creation. God’s gifts are of the breath of life; water; food; habitat; and joy for which God provides wine to gladden the heart.

Our globalised world has been obeying a metanarrative founded on materialism, consumerism and ‘technolatry’. Rapid economic exchange, destruction of natural environments and globalised commerce guide our economic model.

Bauckman also introduces us to Colossians 1:15-20 as the basis of a new metanarrative, which he calls ‘cosmic christology’. This christology confronts human beings, created a little lower than the angels, with a creation they have plunged into chaos, infected with poisonous waste and condemned to accelerating death. Colossians brings us the good news of Christ the first-born of creation in whom all of creation is made and in which all of creation is reconciled and brought to fullness. In his humanity Christ is the image of the invisible God. In his reading of the text the author illustrates that what happened to Christ in microcosm is what happens to the whole universe in macrocosm.

One could pray this book as well as mine it for its biblical wisdom. It is a splendid contribution to the spirituality and theology of Christian environmentalism.

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