Loving Creation

The Task of the Moral Life

Gary Chartier

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506481043
• eBook ISBN: 9781506481050
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian Religions

Is it true that all we need is love? Does love capture the essence of Christian ethics? Does a love-centered ethic need to be impartial in a way that leaves no room at ground-level for relationships and projects? What is the place of well-being in an ethic of love? Loving Creation: The Task of Moral Life seeks to answer these questions by showing how a love-ethic and an ethic of creation are not at odds but rather reinforce each other.

Gary Chartier articulates a love-centered creation ethic--or a creation-centered love-ethic--and applies it to such issues as sex, economic life, love for enemies, and political order. In the book, Chartier offers a powerful alternative both to natural-law theories that seem to lose sight of the welfare of actual people and to the accounts of Christian love that embrace an alienating impartiality. He develops an understanding of Christian love as focused on creation that can contribute effectively to enriching both social practices and personal lives.

Loving Creation is unabashedly theological. But the theological considerations it adduces are ones that will allow Christians to engage in the public sphere with adherents of other religious traditions and of none. It is a contribution not only to theological understanding but also to personal moral reflection, to church practice, and to Christian participation in public life.

1

Creation and Love

Whatever else it involves, to love is to choose out of appropriate regard for the good (well-being, fulfillment, flourishing, welfare, self-realization, . . .) of the one loved.1 Choosing in this way can mean realizing well-being, protecting it, promoting it, or respecting it.2 In this chapter, I explain why we might want to view well-being as essential to love, elaborate an understanding of God’s love in particular, and reflect on what divine providence and divine revelation might look like in light of this understanding before briefly exploring how we might think about creaturely love for God.

Concern with Well-Being as Essential to Love

If I love you, I may also want to spend time with you; I may want your life to be enriched through my actions; I may desire to share my life with you. These and other features may be part of love. But at minimum, if I love you, I act (if I can) with appropriate regard for your welfare. The notion of appropriate regard is built into our notion of love. I can do things for you because you want them, and refusing forcibly to interfere with someone’s choices is not infrequently an important part of love for her. But loving you is about something other than doing or giving just whatever you happen to want. It’s about concern for your welfare. So, for instance, giving you space to choose is part of loving you because, among other things, developing and exercising your capacity for judgment help to constitute your own well-being.

Just as with other people, so with myself: loving myself means choosing with genuine regard for my own well-being. I can seek to fulfill my own desires—setting off, for instance, on a program of revenge that will likely result in my death and that will leave alienation and destruction in my wake. But doing just what I want, giving myself what I feel like having just because I feel like having it, isn’t a way of loving myself. What I want won’t necessarily contribute to my fulfillment. In loving myself, just as in loving others, it’s important to ask what contributes to my real-world welfare, not just to my acquisition of whatever I happen to desire.

If I love when I choose with appropriate regard for well-being, then love must be love for some particular sentient creature. Well-being is always some creature’s well-being. There’s no such thing as well-being that’s distinct from the well-being of every actual moral patient (that is, every morally considerable entity whose welfare can be affected by what some agent does). You can’t promote, protect, respect, or realize friendship in the abstract, for instance; every friendship is the friendship of particular human or nonhuman sentients. An aesthetic experience has to be a particular experience; there can’t be the experience of seeing the Mona Lisa that’s not some creature’s experience of seeing the Mona Lisa. Aesthetic experiences are always located in consciousness and so a particular consciousness; and knowledge must at least have the potential to do so, with the result that it must be my knowledge or yours or hers. And so on.

There’s a sense in which I can speak of loving, say, a house—a house that helps connect me with generations of ancestors, with childhood memories, with a lost loved one—because I’ve cathected it, incorporated it into myself. But this is love in a different sense: the house isn’t an independent moral subject. It matters to me, but it matters as part of my own identity or as a means to particular experiences, not as an entity with moral standing of its own. I can’t have regard for its well-being because it’s not a subject and so doesn’t actually have well-being. It doesn’t have a point of view; it can’t appreciate, much less help to realize, any goal. It’s not the kind of reality that can flourish. And so others’ consideration of the house in their plans makes sense, if it does, out of their regard for me.

Love as regard for well-being can include a desire for the benefit of the agent and of others. Recognizing the worth of friendship, for instance, I can desire your friendship as good for me and offer my friendship as good for you (though a friendship, once formed, transcends simple divisions between self and other). But love as desire counts as love only if it includes appropriate regard for the well-being of the one desired.

Grounded in Love

God is love. So God’s activity of creation both expresses divine love for creatures and seeks to bring about love among creatures and love of creatures toward God. In what follows, I suggest some reasons for speaking of God as love; emphasize that to talk about God as love must mean that creation is real and that creatures are God’s partners in love; indicate why we might think of created persons as inherently and, at base, equally loveable; and spell out what might be involved in calling creation “good.” Then, I reflect on the dynamics of God’s love for and with creation and consider what a love-centered approach might mean for talk of the relationship between nature and grace and the relationship between creation and redemption.

God Is Love

The conviction that God is essentially love deserves extensive development and explication. But, to make a case briefly here, biblical writers speak repeatedly of God’s love and of God as love. Divine love is at the center of both prophetic declamation and New Testament teaching—notably the teaching of Jesus. It has also figured centrally in the Christian tradition, both in theology and in the experiences of Christian mystics. (It has also, of course, been evident in texts and religious experiences in a variety of non-Christian traditions.) We can see talk of divine love as essential to what we say about divine goodness; without incorporating reference to such love, our talk of divine goodness risks being vacuous. If divine goodness is a necessary aspect of who God is, then—presuming love is integral to divine goodness—love, in particular, is an essential divine attribute. And this can seem even more evident if we understand the lives of creatures as in some sense incorporated in the divine life, so that God wills God’s own good and the good of creatures inextricably.

Created Partnership in Love

Affirming that God the Creator is love commits us to, among other things, the conviction that creation is real. God could contemplate a purely imagined world, and divine contemplation could involve a delight we might perhaps regard as a kind of love by courtesy or extension. But, if concern for well-being is essential to love in the primary sense, then, in order to be the object of God’s love, any creature must be capable of having well-being. Something can have well-being only if it is real—I can’t make a fantasy object better or worse off. And something real can have well-being only if it possesses, at least in some sense, the capacity to appreciate and act; there’s no such thing as the well-being of a grain of sand. Any creature who is the object of God’s love must, then, be real and possess the capacity to appreciate and act. To be able to appreciate and act is to be a partner in love, capable of loving along with God. So the creatures who are the objects of God’s love must themselves be partners in love, not only loving God responsively but also mediating God’s love to their fellow creatures.

Persons as Loveable

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.”3 Persons are objects of love for us and for God because of the irreplaceable uniqueness of each individual life, of each unique individual world, a world that could not drop out of existence without loss.4 God’s love and ours are also fitting because persons exhibit the beauty of sheer, particular existence. God treasures us as products of divine creativity, as partners in loving the world (whether or not we realize this), as friends (again, whether or not we know it), and as sentients incorporated in the divine life.

Irreplaceability and the inherent beauty of particular existence are characteristics of all persons, and they thus render persons fundamentally morally equal in entitlement to moral consideration. I have reason to treasure every other created person as possessing the same characteristics that entitle me to moral consideration by others, so that ignoring or discounting another would make no sense given my valuation of myself and my conviction that others should value me. We welcome, even desire, other persons and seek their well-being for all sorts of reasons, just as we may respond instinctively to some with aversion. But, whatever may attract us to or repel us from another person, just as a person, she is rightly an object of love.

The same considerations warrant our declining to attack nonhuman sentients—the sparrows God notices in their uniqueness5—and our openness to welcoming them into friendship. The basic characteristics that unite finite persons and render them morally significant similarly entail our loving recognition of these fellow members of “lifekind.”6

Creation as Good

Genesis 1 repeatedly affirms that God contemplated this or that product of divine creative activity and “saw that it was good.”7 And, the Bible’s first chapter declares, God saw that creation as a whole “was very good.”8

It should come as no surprise that what is made by God, perfect in knowledge and power, should be good. But it is worth emphasizing that Genesis 1 speaks of God’s seeing that what God has made is good. Perhaps this is just a matter of God’s seeing that divine intentions have been realized. But we can also understand it as premised on the assumption that goodness is objective; that it’s not, somehow, an arbitrary posit of the divine will; that claims about goodness are correct or incorrect in virtue of how things actually are.

The world God has made is good for both God and sentient creatures.

The world is good for God. (i) It is home to sentient creatures who can enter into friendship with God. (ii) The impersonal, nonsentient aspects of the world make possible the activities and experiences of these sentient creatures, including their awareness of and responsiveness to God. (iii) The sentient and nonsentient aspects of the world are aesthetically excellent and so inherently worth contemplating.

The world is also good for sentient creatures. (i) Each sentient creature is good for itself. It can welcome the goods realized in its own life. (ii) Sentient creatures can flourish in a variety of ways in and through their interactions with one another. (iii) Sentient creatures can flourish in a variety of ways in and through their interactions with nonsentient realities. Nonsentient realities can extend sentient creatures’ capacities, offer them sustenan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Creation and Love
• 2. A Creational Love Ethic
• 3. Love, Voluntarism, and Vocation
• 4. Loving Alternatives
• 5. Enacting Love
• 6. Creational Love and the Decalogue
• 7. Creational Love and New Testament Teaching
• 8. Creational Love, Sin, and Virtue
• Conclusion
• Index
• About the Author