RECOVERING CREATION: Class Resource Page

This is the information page for First Presbyterian Church’s (Sarasota) upcoming class titled “Recovering Creation.” The class is designed for thoughtful adults who are concerned about global warming and feel at a loss for what Christian faith teaches about such a catastrophic prospect.

Everyone is welcome to attend the class and participate in discussions. The class will focus on texts from the Old and New Testaments and participants may wish to bring their personal Bibles. Bibles belonging to the church will be available for use during the class. No prior knowledge of the Bible or Christianity is necessary and the teacher will explain all terms, names, backgrounds, and religious ideas. The teaching content for all classes is available in print and audio recorded form for participants who wish to read ahead, review or for those who must miss a class.

Most people hear the word “creation” and think “creationism” which is the religious conviction that God made the world at the beginning of all things as opposed to a scientific view that the world came to be through natural processes. This debate has raged for well over a century and continues to bear on current controveries over public school curricula.

This class will not deal with the creationism vs science discussion. Our conviction will be that, when read closely, the Bible does not clash with science. Rather the Bible is interested in the world’s value and the nature and destiny of living things and the role humanity plays in this drama.

The class honors all opinions concerning Christian faith and climate change. The teacher has a high regard for the Bible and holds it as personally authoritative. As for climate change, his opinion conforms to the conclusions of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

All materials, texts, teaching aids, and graphics used in this class may be used by class participants without permission or attribution.

Smart phone use to gain access to background materials is encouraged during class sessions.

Course Schedule

Date	Class Name	Teacher	Room	Resources
Sunday, January 14, 2024, 10:00 a.m. to 10:50 a.m.	The Eclipse of Creation	DeCelle	203	“What Climate Scientists Really Think“, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” US Religious Groups Do Not View Climate Change as a Crisis, You Tube recording of first class
Sunday, January 21, 2024, 10:00 a.m. to 10:50 a.m.	The Character of Creation	DeCelle	203	Class Handout and Explanation, You Tube Recording of Class, Written Version of the Class: The Character of Creation
Sunday, January 28, 2024, 10:00 a.m. to 10:50 a.m.	Our Interrelated World	DeCelle	203	Class Handout , You Tube Recording of the Class
Sunday, February 4, 2024, 10:00 a.m. to 10:50 a.m.	The Garden of Eden	DeCelle	203	You Tube Recording of Class Notes

Resources

Author	Title	Year
Westermann, Claus	Creation	1974
Anderson, Bernhard	Creation in the Old Testament	1985
Anderson, Bernhard	Creation versus Chaos: The Reinterpretation of Mythical Symbolism in the Bible	1987
Barr, James	Biblical Faith and Natural Theology: The Gifford Lectures for 1991	1991
Simkins, Ronald	Creator and Creation: Nature in the Worldview of Ancient Israel	1994
Levenson, Jon	Creation and the Persistence of Evil	1994
Brown, William P.	The Ethos of the Cosmos	1999
Loning, Zenger	To Begin With, God Created: Biblical Theologies of Creation	2000
Garr, Randal	In His Own Image and Likeness: Humanity, Divinity, and Monotheism	2003
Fretheim, Terence	God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation	2005
Anderson, Bernhard	From Creation to New Creation: Old Testament Perspectives	2005
Steck, Odil Hannes	World and Environment	2008
Fretheim, Terence	God So Enters into Relationships That . . .: A Biblical View	2020

Why a Class on Creation?

Several weeks ago I was pleased to discover, reading the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication website, that the number of Americans concerned about climate change has increased to about half the population.  And then a couple of days ago, Religion News Service published survey results showing a drop in the percentage of American Evangelicals who think climate change is a crisis—14% in 2014, 8% today.

These numbers are only the latest indicators that Christianity, notably American Protestantism, struggles with its attitude, its theology, of the natural world. 

I don’t want to point an accusatory finger at conservative Christianity as if I have not also been part of the problem.  I served as the pastor of Presbyterian congregations for 40 years, preaching and teaching weekly.  I thought of myself as someone who “kept up” with what academic theologians and different church traditions were thinking. 

Shortly after my retirement in 2017, I had an unsettling conversation with my son-in-law, Mike.  Mike’s employer, a large book publisher, had assigned him to work with climate scientists and to bring their books to publication.  

That conversation forced me to reckon with the fact that humanity had irreversibly damaged the biosphere and that the planet was hurtling towards a massive die-off of many plant and animal species.  The most frightening part of climate change was that humanity itself might become extinct.

When the magnitude of the crisis sank in I began to try to reconcile it with Christian faith.  Did the biblical authors even know about extinction?  Does the Bible talk about the fate of the planet at all?  Is nature just the stage on which the drama of human redemption plays out?  Or is all of life like the first stage of a rocket that lifts saved people heavenward only to fall away dead? 

Could I remain a Christian and take seriously the impressive scientific consensus about where planet earth was headed?

This latter question did not haunt me for very long.  I began to see in the Old Testament a couple of situations that resembled our climate crisis.  The pre-exile Old Testament prophets, for example, linked Israel and Judah’s waywardness to the encroaching crisis of the empires of Assyria and Babylon overrunning Canaan and destroying God’s people. 

The Genesis Flood story intrigued me.  Those rising waters that lifted Noah’s ark looked like one of the signature effects of global warming.  The idea of “apocalypse” or unveiling in the Book of Revelation cast a revealing and hopeful light on what we’re experiencing today.  Some recent theologians have come up with an idea they call “deep incarnation.”  In this thinking, Jesus Christ not only takes on the form of the human but also the animal and even the material.  Thus, Jesus’ death represents a profound solidarity between God and all of creation.  And Jesus’ resurrection extends this solidarity so that as the Father raises Jesus so also does the Father raise all that are in him.

The Animals

Early in my climate journey, I hoped to raise an alarm among my fellow church goers over what was becoming of the world.  I thought that if people, Christians, realized that animals were suffering, they may get engaged with the wider problem of global warming.  The extinction of animals seems more alarming than an uptick in the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, which is the main culprit in raising the earth’s temperature. 

My study of animals, which benefited from a spate of publishing in the last decade, led me to see that animals played much more of a role in God’s intentions for the world than I had previously realized. 

My initial shock over global warming nudged me away from an assumption that I’ve unconsciously shared with most other Christians, namely that God had included only a few humans in the scope of redemption.  My circle of those included in the divine plan had expanded to enfold the whole created world, and ironically the whole of the human world.  So, I’ve become a universalist in this process.  I now believe that all that God has created, God intends to preserve, restore, and bring to fullness in goodness, truth, and beauty.

What started as an awakening to what humanity was doing to the world developed into a spiritual journey.  And the journey was just beginning.

During the height of the Covid 19 lockdowns, I listened online to some of Greg Boyd’s preaching.   Greg Boyd is the pastor of the Woodland Hills Church in Minneapolis, and he describes himself as an “open and relational theist.”  His sermons tackle issues such as the persistence of evil, the destiny of all things, and the character of God’s judgment. 

Like most preachers, I had long steered away from these topics.  But now I was hearing someone who had a theological grounding similar to what I was feeling my way towards as I wrestled with climate change.  Unlike the 92% of evangelicals who skirt the climate crisis, Greg Boyd spoke with compelling insight about it.

Naturally, I was curious about Boyd’s influences.  Who were his teachers?  As it turns out, Boyd had been a long-time friend of Terrence Fretheim of Minneapolis’ Luther Seminary, a prominent Old Testament scholar.  I had read Fretheim’s first book, The Suffering of God and I owned his Interpretation Commentary on the Book of Exodus.  What I didn’t know was that he had written a study of the theology of creation in 2005, titled God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation. 

I fear that this recounting of an intellectual journey will be tedious for the reader, as I wander from topic to topic and book to book.  But for me, I was getting answers to my question, “Why do churches not know what to do with the climate crisis?”  Specifically, the Christian world, the church world that I had inhabited, just had not been reading its own scriptures, particularly the Old Testament. with any depth. 

Before I stop writing about myself, I’ll recount one more surprising discovery.  The late Terrence Fretheim had, thanks to Greg Boyd, resurfaced in my thoughts.  I had read Fretheim’s Suffering of God in connection with my doctor of ministry work at Louisville Seminary in the early 1990’s. Both my classmates and importantly, our professors were impressed with Fretheim’s work. 

Fretheim has since written God and World in the Old Testament.  Obviously, I wanted to read it.  On its first pages, Fretheim says that churches and academic theologians had long ignored creation.  This observation is not simply an opinion.  He was echoing what world class Old Testament scholars had been saying since the 1970’s. 

For example, the systematic theologian, George Hendry is representative of the scholarly awakening to creation when in 1971 he stood before the American Theological Society and said, “Not only is creation in eclipse in contemporary theology; it has ceased to play any significant part in popular piety.”

It’s important to remember what happened in the early 1970s.  The environmental movement had gotten a grip on the public imagination.  The world was suddenly concerned about what was happening to the natural world.  And in the realm of academic theology, scholars were realizing that they had neglected the biblical tradition that would enable them to participate in the wider conversation about the environment.  This realization prompted a significant publishing boom of books that re-explored and reclaimed creation.

Throughout my years as a pastor in several places, this creation boom never came to my attention.  During these years I preached at least once every Sunday. I completed an advanced degree and kept up with trends and writings in Christian faith. 

And I never realized that there was a “turn to creation” among theologians.  Now in 2024, seven years after my retirement and in the midst of catastrophic global warming, I’ve bumped into creation as a powerful answer to my perplexity over what faith says about climate change.

Here’s another conviction that haunts me: church congregations are as disoriented today about the world around us as we were in the early 1970s.   

And…there exists a small library of books on creation.  Thinkers like Greg Boyd, advocates of process thought, spirituality teachers, and Catholics devoted to the Ludato Si movement, appear to be more attuned to Creation Theology than we are in the Reformed and Evangelical worlds.

Climate scientists recognize that decisive action to halt and reverse the human destruction of the biosphere will not come through fashionable gestures like carrying glass drinking straws or driving hybrid cars.  Neither can we rely on governments to legislate our way out of he climate crisis.  Only a change of consciousness, a sea change in attitudes, will enable humanity to turn aside from its disastrous course.

And the Christian movement possesses the resources to do its part.  

Recovering a robust biblical theology of creation is the best way forward.

What Understanding Creation Gives Us

The point of recording, retelling, and studying creation is not to learn about how the world came to be, but what the world is today. And because the creator made people and animals in the creation stories, we gather clues on who we are and what we are to do. 

Here are 9 ways that the creation stories shed light on some of life’s most perplexing mysteries:

1. Creation makes clear that the world is valuable.  Not every philosophy, religion, or economic theory through history has said this. 
2. Creation offers that a beginning implies an end.  We have in the biblical creation powerful clues about the destiny of what has been made.
3. How creation happens shines a light on how the Creator continues to work in the world.  How the Creator relates to and inhabits the world is illuminated by the Creation texts.  
4. The Creation stories narrate the making of peoples who do not know about nor believe in the creation story.  The Bible’s creation texts explore their nature, calling, and destiny.
5. The Creation Stories imply through their silence what is not created and does not exist.  The Creation Stories disclose information on what evil is and where it comes from.
6.  The biblical creation stories are comparable to but different from other creation stories and the scientific account for the world’s existence.  Comparisons highlight biblical faith’s unique values.
7. The biblical creation stories provide a place to stand when considering the prospect of extinction of animals and humanity.  Is the destruction predicted by climate scientists part of the world’s destiny, is it the wrath or plan of God, will it be averted?
8. Biblical creation shines a fresh light on redemption and the ministry of Jesus Christ.  How does creation and redemption relate to one another?  How does the divine Christ participate in the work of creation?