Creation Untamed (Theological Explorations for the Church Catholic)

The Bible, God, and Natural Disasters

Terence E. Fretheim

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780801038938
• eBook ISBN: 9781441213594
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, and hurricanes have plagued the history of the earth. What is God's role in natural disasters and the human suffering they cause? This is one of the most vexing questions in Christian life and theology. Terence Fretheim offers fresh readings of familiar Old Testament passages--such as creation, the flood, and the suffering of Job--to give readers biblical resources for working through this topic. He shows the God of the Bible to be a compassionate, suffering, relational God, one we can turn to in prayer in times of disaster.

1

God Created the World Good, Not Perfect

“Community” and “relationship” are “in words” in current theological discussions. All creatures of God together constitute a community in relationship. More particularly, human beings are understood, not as isolated creatures of God, but as part of a global community. Our lives touch the “life” of all other creatures, whether for good or for ill. As Denis Edwards states: “Any contemporary theology of the human . . . will need to situate the human within the community of life. It will need to be a theology of the human-in-relation-to-other-creatures.” 1 Everyone and everything is in relationship; reality is relational. Indeed, as we will see, such interrelatedness is true not only of the world of creatures; it is also true of God. Both God and world are constituted by relationships within which one can speak of both commonality and distinction. This is a strong biblical claim, though it is not as often recognized as one might think. Even more important, this claim is not commonly interpreted in ways that take relationship language with genuine seriousness.

A negative aspect of this relational perspective is that any damage to the community or communities to which we belong diminishes us all.² This earthly home, this community, has been damaged, especially by the actions of human beings. Indeed, the church bears some responsibility, not least by its slowness in recognizing the need, its relatively tepid response (even silence), and all too often its theological perspective. It is remarkably common among Christians that a theology of demolition is in place, wherein it is understood that the world is going to come to an end quite soon anyway, so why bother to be concerned about the needy or the environment.

Another theological matter that aggravates the issue is the common imaging of God. God is often portrayed as a God whose will for the world is irresistible; in the common parlance, “God is in control.” This often means that God is one who will “take care of everything,” come what may. One implication of such a perspective is that human beings are thereby encouraged to be negligent regarding matters such as care for the environment and let God do whatever God is going to do. Given these realities and other factors, we are faced with a global crisis in which creatures of God’s own making are threatened and the home that we share is being ravaged. Jürgen Moltmann puts it this way: “If human beings are themselves ‘part of nature,’ . . . then any destruction of nature necessarily also includes an element of human self-destruction.”³ Any damage to the community or communities to which we belong diminishes us all.

At the same time, we can be thankful for the increasing recognition of the issues that are at stake and the remarkable efforts being made to correct, preserve, and enhance our interconnected life together. This “environmental conversion” includes not only Christians, but also people from many different religious and nonreligious perspectives. God the Creator is at work among us all to bring life and healing.

My most basic claim in this chapter is this: God created the world good, not perfect.⁴ In support of that claim, I will think closely about the kind of God who is depicted in the creation accounts (Gen. 1–2) and what sorts of creational moves God makes. I will argue that God makes a decision to create in community rather than alone; at the divine initiative, the creation plays an active role in God’s creating work. Then I will explore the implications of that divine move for the life of both creature and Creator and, more particularly, for our environmental considerations. I am especially interested here in setting a stage for later chapters on natural disasters.

I will work with the two creation accounts in Genesis as a single witness to creation.⁵ Whatever the history of tradition may have been, Genesis 1 and 2 together constitute Israel’s primary witness to the Creator God (and the only nonspeculative one).⁶ Many persons have engaged in the study of these chapters, and a growing literature is now available across the theological disciplines. Still, the study of Old Testament resources for this conversation is in its infancy – not least because of the secondary status that creation has had in much biblical reflection.⁷ Somehow we must gain a sense that creation is a primary theological vision in the Old Testament and that how we think that matter through will have a considerable effect on related reflections.

Good and Perfect

The most basic statement of Genesis 1–2 regarding created beings is that they are “good” and “very good.”⁸ Every creature is evaluated in these terms; the human being is not given a special evaluative word; indeed, human beings are not even given a separate creation day but rather share the sixth day with the animals. Moreover, this oft-repeated evaluation is reported as a direct divine evaluation: God saw that it was good; God saw that “everything” was good. This evaluation is not reported as an assessment of the narrator, but as God’s own evaluation.

What does it mean to be evaluated good by God? At the least, it means that God is not done with the creatures once they are brought into being. God experiences what has been created, is affected by what is seen, and passes judgment on the results. This divine way is illumined by the divine evaluation in Genesis 2:18, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” Such a divine response to the creation up to this point assumes that evaluating the created order is an ongoing process, within which adjustments and even improvements can be made in view of the divine response and the engagement of the human. This is what happens in 2:19–22, with 2:23 constituting an evaluation by the human!⁹

And what does it mean to be evaluated as good? The word “good” carries the sense of corresponding to the divine intention, including elements of beauty, purposefulness, and praiseworthiness. God observes a decisive continuity between God’s intention and the creational result. At the same time, “good” does not mean static or perfect.¹⁰ For most interpreters, the word “perfect” means something like “without fault, defect, or inadequacy, or in no need of improvement or development to be what it truly is.” The word “good,” however, is different in its basic sense and needs closer attention.

Several clues in the text demonstrate that “perfect” is not the appropriate way to assess the creational situation. For one, if the creation were perfect, how could anything go wrong, such as is reported in the chapters that follow? For another, the “not good” of Genesis 2:18 relative to the human being pushes in this direction of reflection; it suggests that creation is a process and that it moves toward “good.” But the command to “subdue” the earth (1:28) is the clearest evidence for the claim.¹¹ This verb, used elsewhere in the Old Testament for coercive human activities against other humans (see 2 Sam. 8:11; Esther 7:8; Jer. 34:11), is never applied to relationships with creatures that are not human.¹² Moreover, the verb is here used in a pre-sin context, before any negative effects that sin has brought, and apparently no enemies are in view.¹³ Given its use in a pre-sin context, one should be careful not simply to transfer the usage of the verb for post-sin human activity to an understanding of this word here. More seems to be at stake.

I have suggested that the best sense for the verb is “to bring order out of continuing disorder.”¹⁴ The command may have in view God’s own pattern of acting relative to the already-existent “earth,” as in Genesis 1:9–10: “Let the waters . . . be gathered together, . . . and let the dry land appear,” which God called Earth. The command to “subdue” assumes that the earth was not fully developed, that there was not a once-for-all givenness to the creation at the end of the seventh day. The command is given in the service of developing God’s creation toward its fullest possible potential. God’s creation is a dynamic reality and is going somewhere; it is a long-term project, ever in the process of becoming – as the history of nature shows, with the earth-changing activities of such creatures as glaciers, earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis. This potential of becoming is built into the very structures of the world. For human beings to subdue the earth, together with the involvement of other creatures (see below), means that over time the creation would look quite different than it did on the seventh day. Somewhat ironically, God gives to the human being this “natural law” in order that the created order would not remain the same.

In other terms, Genesis does not present the creation as a finished product, wrapped up with a big red bow and handed over to the creatures to keep it exactly as originally created. It is not a onetime production. Indeed, for the creation to stay just as God originally created it would constitute a failure of the divine design. From God’s perspective, the world needs work; development and change are what God intends for it, and God enlists human beings (and other creatures) to that end. From another angle, God did not exhaust the divine creativity in the first week of the world; God continues to create and uses creatures in a vocation that involves the becoming of creation.

The evaluation “good” is not taken away when sin enters the life of the world. Sin negatively affects the life of human beings, certainly, and through them the life of other creatures. But nowhere does Scripture take away the evaluation “good” from any creature. In the wake of sin many texts actually will reinforce that evaluation, sometimes in even stronger terms. With respect to human beings, God announces, “You are precious in my sight, and honored” (Isa. 43:5); God continues to regard them as “crowned . . . with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:5).

Though human beings certainly need to hear that they often think of themselves more highly than they ought to think, it is also important for them to hear that they often think of themselves less highly than they ought to think. To speak less highly of the human is to diminish the quality of God’s own work. And this is the case not least because of such continuing divine evaluations of them as good. The creational commands in Genesis 1:28 and God’s engagement with the human in 2:19–20 indicate that God values human beings, places confidence in them, and honors what they do and say, though not uncritically. Human words and deeds count; they make a difference to the world and to God, not least because God has chosen to use human agents in getting God’s work done in the world (see below). We need constantly to be reminded that the godness of God cannot be bought at the expense of creaturely diminishment.

Another word that can be used to designate the goodness of creatures is “free.”¹⁵ One way in which the creation accounts witness to this reality is the seventh day of creation (Gen. 2:1–3); this day on which God rests (not human beings)¹⁶ is testimony to God’s suspension of creative activity, which allows the creatures, each in its own way, to be what they were created to be. God thereby gives to all creatures a certain independence and freedom. With regard to human beings, God leaves room for genuine decisions as they exercise their God-given power (see already 2:19). With regard to nonhuman creatures, God releases them from “tight divine control” and permits them to be themselves as the creatures they are.¹⁷ The latter includes the becoming of creation, from the movement of tectonic plates to volcanic activity, to the spread of viruses, to the procreation of animals. This divine commitment to the creatures entails an ongoing divine constraint and restraint in the exercise of power, a divine commitment that we often wish had not been made, especially when suffering and death are in view.¹⁸ But God will remain true to God’s commitments, come what may.

From another angle, the divine commands of Genesis 1:28 (be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue, have dominion) are given for the sake of the future of the world. Law is thus understood as a pre-sin reality that is built into its creational structures. Concern for the future of the creation is made a matter of divine law from the very beginning. When Israel is later given the law, the people of God thereby are to understand that they stand in the tradition of creational law, and that they are caught up by God in a vocation that involves, among other things, the becoming of creation.¹⁹

And so God creates a dynamic world in which the future is open to a number of possibilities and in which creaturely activity is crucial for proper creational developments. In other words, God chooses to establish an interdependent relationship with the creation; God chooses to work with others in creating. Certain constants are in place: seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night (Gen. 8:22). But beyond that, the future of the world is characterized by a remarkable open-endedness, in which more than God is involved (see below).

Thinking about the Creator God

How we think about the Creator God of Genesis 1–2 will sharply affect how we carry on this conversation.²⁰ It is almost a chorus among commentators that God created the world alone, with overwhelming power and absolute control, while working independently and unilaterally. Making such claims about the Creator God constitutes a practical end of the conversation for many interpreters.

But if this understanding of the imaging of God in Genesis 1 is correct, then those created in God’s image (so Gen. 1:26) could properly understand their role regarding the rest of creation in comparable terms: in terms of power over, absolute control, and independence. By definition, the natural world thus becomes available for human manipulation and exploitation. Thus, if all the creatures of Genesis 1 are understood to be but passive putty in the hands of God, does that not invite a comparable treatment of them by those created in the image of such a God? In other words, how we image the God of the creation accounts will have a significant impact on our view of the world, our environmental sensitivities, and the urgency of our practices.

What if the God of the creation accounts is imaged more as one who, in creating, chooses to share power? Then the way in which the human as image of God exercises dominion is to be shaped by that model. Even more, if the God of the creation accounts is imaged as one who also involves nonhuman creatures in still further creations, as we will see, then that should inform our understanding of the value, indeed great value, that they have been given by God.

Although creatures are deeply dependent on God for their c...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• SERIES PREFACE
• AUTHOR PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. GOD CREATED THE WORLD GOOD, NOT PERFECT
• 2. THE GOD OF THE FLOOD STORY AND NATURAL DISASTERS
• 3. NATURAL DISASTERS, THE WILL OF THE CREATOR, AND THE SUFFERING OF JOB
• 4. SUFFERING AND THE GOD OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
• 5. GOD, FAITH, AND THE PRACTICE OF PRAYER
• CONCLUSION