Abstract
This book is part of the Sarum Theological Lectures series, which is ‘designed to make accessible to a wide audience the work of specialists’. It is not just another popular Christian environmentalist book. Richard Bauckham brings here not only distinctive insights, but also synthesizes, drawing on recent research, and the wisdom of a leading biblical scholar and theologian.
The book has five chapters. In the first, Bauckham explores some inadequacies of the ‘stewardship’ model. Then he considers Genesis 1 and points to its celebration of species diversity, and the interdependence implicit in the gift of edible plants. I will quibble with one point. To explain why only humankind (apparently) is to ‘fill’ the land (1:28), he links ‘fill’ with the uniquely human practice of farming and suggests: ‘Without agriculture the land does not produce enough food for humans to fill it’ (p. 17). Does this imply that aboriginal hunters and gatherers never fulfilled the mandate in their lands? Is the imperative only fulfilled above a particular level of density? I read ‘fill’ spatially as geographical distribution, and Bauckham admits that filling the land ‘should not be taken over-literally’ (p. 17).
He blames ecological problems on modern aspirations for mastery over nature, because ‘the ecological crisis has its roots in generally well-meaning scientific and technological projects’ (p. 4). He sees a seventeenth-century shift, and its emblem is Francis Bacon who ‘hijacked the Genesis text to authorise the project of…technological exploitation whose excesses have given us the ecological crisis’ (p. 6). Bauckham makes clear that technology is ambivalent and can be good, but its positive aspect could usefully have been emphasised more. True, technophilia (p. 4) can be destructive, but an alternative history could, for example, blame capitalism rather than technology. Without modern technology human impact would be worse. For example sewage, and smoke from coal and wood fires, were already problems in medieval London. If today’s more numerous British city-dwellers used primitive fires the impact would be even worse. Good technologies ameliorate the burden that overpopulation and affluence impose on ecosystems.
The second chapter, ‘Putting Us in Our Place’, is a commentary on Job 38–41. The wildness of the ten species described in Job 38.39 to 39.30 shows their independence and strangeness, a different perspective from Genesis 1–2. Bauckham finds that awareness of otherness need not cause alienation, but instead can lead to humility and delight. In later verses, the Leviathan and Behemoth symbolise powers of chaos which God alone controls, and this echoes his earlier concern (p. 5) about the hubris and danger of proposals to attempt deliberate planetary management.
The third chapter explores the ‘Community of Creation’. A vision of humankind as fellow creatures (a horizontal relation) is primary, whereas dominion (a vertical relation) is secondary. Commentary on Psalm 104 and Matthew 6 finds solidarity and a shared dependence on God’s provision. All creatures praise their creator just by being, as in Psalm 148. They also mourn the disorder caused by humankind, as in Joel and other prophets. They groan in Romans 8, and here he engages with a recent article by Cherryl Hunt, David Horrell and Christopher Southgate. In general, those seeking to recover ecological biblical insight should join Bauckham in listening to these cautionary voices from Exeter.
‘Where the Wild Things Are’, the fourth chapter, is a fascinating look at categories of nature/culture and wild/domestic. The garden of Eden pictures both aspects in harmony. The idea that the Bible ‘promotes a negative view of wilderness’, which has been much used by US advocates of exploitation, is challenged. Bauckham explains that ‘wilderness’ in the Bible is mostly arid desert. By contrast, OT writers did not hate the forest, though they feared its predatory inhabitants. They accept that whereas some places are settled, other places are made for nonhuman creatures. Similarly, for OT writers the distinction between domestic and wild belongs to creation: it had always been so. That is plausible as the origins of human association with goats, sheep, and other species, was beyond memory; thousands of years before the OT writers. Bauckham sees no agenda here to tame progressively, to clear all forests, or to hominize all nature. Animal welfare is rightly included in this vision, and he strongly criticizes factory farming (p. 136).
New Testament texts feature across the book, but in the final chapter, ‘From Alpha to Omega’, the focus shifts. Two points justifying an ecological reading of the New Testament are its references to ‘all things’ (and other phrases that encompass the whole creation), and the biblical meta-narrative of God’s direct relation not only with humankind but also with other living creatures, and even inanimate creation. Bauckham explains modern Christianity’s failure to see this by blaming alien meta-narratives: not only the ancient and medieval dualism of body and spirit, but more damagingly since the seventeenth century a dualism of nature and (human) history. This was explained in greater detail in his earlier book, God and the Crisis of Freedom (Westminster John Knox Press, 2002). To dispel those false dualisms, Bauckham presents the universal lordship of Christ, as found especially in Colossians 1 and John’s gospel. In a powerful section drawing on many other biblical texts he presents the Kingdom of God as the renewal of all creation.
Another reviewer (Norman Habel in the Review of Biblical Literature) observes that no hermeneutic is explicitly set out here. Those seeking it must look elsewhere in Bauckham’s work, for example the first chapter of the second edition of The Bible in Politics: How to Read the Bible Politically (2011). There (pp. 3-19) he argues that typically a text has had and will have multiple new ‘meanings’ for readers in different contexts, but all should be natural extensions of its ‘core meaning’. So the first task, insofar as it is possible, is to identify a text’s ‘historical meaning’ and this must be something ‘which readers at that time could perceive’. The next task is to discern the core meaning which ‘is contained within’ the original meaning. It is similar to a paradigmatic approach. This core, alongside canonical context, should discipline our efforts to relate the text to contemporary political issues. My summary does not do justice to his nuances. As a more popular book, Bible and Ecology has no long hermeneutic introduction, but it takes a similar approach.
Bauckham succeeds in bridging the gap between academy and church. This book should be valued by many different audiences: specialists in ecological interpretation will find new ideas here, but it is also suitable for undergraduates and I have adopted it for a module in Christian Rural and Environmental Studies. There are substantial endnotes, a thorough index of biblical references, and a subject index. The book is accessible, and could be recommended to those who might only read one book on the topic. It is not only illuminating, but also encouraging. The final sentence trusts that ‘finding our place in the biblical meta-narrative—reconciled in Christ, on the way to the reconciliation of all things in Christ—will help to sustain hope in dark times’ (p. 178).