By The Reverend Professor Andrew Linzey, Director of Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics

It is an old tradition that the earth and everything that lives on it are made for human beings. The idea certainly predates Christianity. Aristotle held that everything was made to some purpose and so it followed, according to nature, that plants and animals were made for humankind. But, although the doctrine was taken up by Augustine, Aquinas and later Christian thinkers, its claim to be biblical is very tenuous indeed. Certainly there are instrumentalist tendencies within scripture, but the view that all creation was made just for us is not stated unambiguously in either the Old Testament or the New.

The time is long overdue for a reappraisal of this heritage. And it might be hoped that evangelicals, who so often sit loose to church tradition, might be the people to lead the way. Indeed, in ‘The Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation,’ which forms the cornerstone of IVP’s book The Care of Creation (2000), there are welcome signs of a fundamental rethink.1 It affirms that ‘the Creator’s concern is for all creatures’ and ‘he delights in creatures which have no … apparent usefulness [to humans]’.

But it seems as though the familiar idea and the old terminology will not die. The problem is stated — albeit unwittingly — by John Stott in his foreword. He reminds us that “Scripture tells us that ‘the earth is the Lord’s’ (Psalm 24.1) and also that ‘the earth he has given to man’ (Psalm 115.16),” and asserts that there is no contradiction between these two ideas. But a contradiction is not resolved simply by denying that it exists.

As Stott expounds it, “The Earth belongs to God by creation and to us by delegation.” But that half verse from Psalm 115 is significant for what it does not say: namely, that the earth is given solely to for us, or that we are the sole rightful occupants, or that God is concerned exclusively for our kind. The truth is that we continue to read scripture through Aristotle’s eyes.

Sharp proof of this is seen later in the book when Richard Wright denounces the Christian right in the United States for opposing the declaration.

Yet it is no surprise that E. C. Beisner (to take one example) cites the very same line of scripture as Stott in his attempt to refute Christian environmentalism. As he implies, if the earth belongs to humans, we are entitled to transform “the cursed earth — the wilderness — into a garden.”

Wright, I fear, is too keen to dismiss evangelicals who reject environmentalism. He fails to appreciate that the idea that the earth exists for and belongs to humankind, which goes back to Aristotle if not further, continues to resonate deeply within the Christian tradition, and is still current within all churches. Only recently, the Catholic Catechism reaffirmed without a blush that God “destined all material creatures for the good of the human race.”2

Wright draws the conclusion that Christian anti-environmentalism “is a direct consequence of political commitments,” and “theological considerations are of secondary importance, although they may be used to justify politically motivated opposition.” Well, far be it from me to defend the US Christian right, but Beisner’s position really does require a more careful response than Wright provides. Denying theological integrity to one’s opponents does not persuade anyone.

Much more important (and, with a few honourable exceptions, this applies to all of the contributors to this book), such astringency fails to deal with why evangelicals have such enormous difficulty in taking environmental issues seriously. Howard Marshall is much nearer the mark when he admits frankly that New Testament-reading evangelicals who have not embraced the green cause have a “good case” — so good, in fact, that environmental care amounts only to an “implicit command” and one that is “only dimly perceived in Scripture.”

On the other hand, Alister McGrath maintains robustly that “any responsible attempt to take seriously the biblical insights concerning creation” will accept, inter alia, that “humanity is charged with the tending of creation … in the full knowledge that this creation is a cherished possession of God.”

But what is to be said to, and what are we to do with, those “irresponsible” evangelicals who acknowledge no such insight and no corresponding duty of care?

It is not enough to get angry (as Wright does) with fellow evangelicals who have not seen the green light: Christians who believe that the Bible clearly enjoins the care of creation really need to explain, to themselves and others, why it is that they have been able to resist the implications of such teaching, and for so long. There is a history of indifference which needs to be interpreted.

Oliver O’Donovan writes that it is impossible for the declaration to say very much about this history “because there is too much to be said.” Well, I for one want to hear it, however long it takes, and my sense is that such sober historical reflection should precede rather than follow the making of declarations.

The books fail to recognise that, given standard evangelical assumptions, there is a general presumption against environmentalism which requires some careful engagement and not a little historical understanding. It could be that the instrumentalist view of creation that Stott touches on constitutes the very cornerstone of that presumption. In the overly confident words of Peter Harris, “to recognise God as being the Creator of all rescues us in a very practical way from the working assumption of our times that the creation is there just for us.” So indeed it should — but that it has not is of more than historical interest.

But if this collection is sometimes marred by a kind of self-righteous incredulity towards evangelicals who have the temerity to disagree, the same fare is dished out, but in double dose, to those classed as “New Agers,” creation devotees or “the vegetarian sandal brigade.”

Such knockabouts are to be expected in a campaigning book, but they sit oddly with the statement in the declaration, “We call upon Christians to listen and work with all those who are concerned about the healing of creation, with an eagerness … to learn from them.” O’Donovan asks whether we are “prepared to hear, through [creation’s] inhospitable roar, the voice of the Creator, warning and counselling us about our ways.”

I am doubtful of the moral value of seeing God’s judgment at work in environmental crises — after all, it is not always the cruel and the avaricious who are thereby impoverished and brought low — but it has to be said that a less triumphalist book than this one might have seen God’s judgment in the fact that so many contemporary “other-believers” espouse a care for creation that many Christians have yet to match.

Not only do the contributors inadequately address the problem of the perceived instrumentality of creation, they also go to some lengths to avoid confronting precisely the status of creation itself. Christians who believe in the fall of creation, as I do, are, it seems, dinosaurs. The declaration affirms the biblical view that God created everything “good” and speaks only of creation suffering from “the consequences of human sin.” Yet, most striking, it accepts that “God’s purpose in Christ is to heal and bring to wholeness not only persons but the entire created order.”

But what, it must be protested, is there to heal and bring to wholeness? Certainly, creation will be saved from human “degradations,” but what of predation and parasitism, all the apparent violence and cruelty inherent in the structures of nature — what St. Paul describes as the “bondage to decay”? The declaration, and the entire book, manages to avoid addressing what C. S. Lewis called the “evil” of predation. Evangelicals such as Michael Lloyd who have argued cogently for the un-Christlikeness of the natural order are not even mentioned.

Since it is so absent from the book, Lloyd’s challenge deserves a hearing now:

If we are to enjoy nature and work to protect and heal it without worshipping it or reflecting its violence … then we need to insist that it is not now as God intended it to be. We need to see it as good but fallen. We need to find ways of continuing to proclaim, in a post-Darwinian world, a doctrine of the fallenness of nature.3

It is ironic that in their assumption that what is — is what God actually created, most of the contributors are uncannily close to New Agers or “creation theologians” such as Matthew Fox, who most resolutely reject the much more traditional view of the fallenness of creation. The truth to be learnt is that nature (whether corrupted by human beings or not) is not unambiguously God’s will. In their desire to minimise dissent, these writers have excised that ambiguity from Christian doctrine.

One other major weakness must be mentioned. The declaration, like all the contributors’ responses to it save, honourably, that of Jorgen Moltmann, is effectively “animal blind.” The only noted sin we commit against other species is to make them extinct. If Luther would turn in his grave at the exposition of a biblical theology which did not refer to the fallenness of creation, what would Wilberforce and Shaftesbury say about an evangelical tract that fails even to register cruelty to animals as a sin before God? That so many prominent Christian writers suppose that they can articulate responsibly “the care of creation” without giving sustained attention to the abuse we inflict on millions of fellow sentient creatures is a sign of unseriousness.

Such an omission calls into question the rhetoric about care and responsibility found on almost every page. It really is not good enough for Ron Sider, for example, summarily to characterise Peter Singer as saying that “any claim that persons have a status different from monkeys and moles is ‘speciesism.’” My disagreements with Singer are a matter of public record, but his defence of animals is worthy of serious engagement even — indeed, especially — where he is mistaken. Such one-liners hardly encourage trust in its editor’s boast that this book has “a robust concern for truth, wherever it may lead.”

I am not against all declarations as such. But those who promulgate them and campaign for them need to be aware of their defensive, and therefore often offensive, character. Their aim, of course, is to demarcate perceived truth. But unpersuaded Christians also have the freedom to think other thoughts and entertain serious misgivings. Those Christians who disparage the apparently “hectoring” tone of the gay-rights or animal-rights lobbies have, I fear, dug a pit for themselves.

Most especially, it is not for those who on other subjects speak of the overwhelming needs for Christian unity and consensus to sign up to declarations which are, invariably, provocative and divisive.

Notes

1. The Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation’ was first published in 1994.

2. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994), para 353, p. 81, English translation.

3. Michael Lloyd, ‘The Humanity of Fallenness’ in Grace and Truth in the Secular Age, edited by Timothy Bradshaw (Eerdmans, 1998), p. 78.

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Revised version of a review article that first appeared in Third Way, July 2000, pp. 23-25. © Copyright, Andrew Linzey, 2003.