The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God (Romans 8:20-21).

C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer in particular have helped me form my view of the meaning of the natural world. And it was Lewis who introduced me to the literary and spiritual mentor who helped him form his view of the creation—among many other views: George MacDonald.

I have used MacDonald’s and Schaeffer’s thought extensively in the articles that reside on this site, but have somewhat ignored Lewis. So today I am going to let “Jack” have a say.

First a little background: I used to be a member of the Audubon Society—in large part in order to receive the always enjoyable Audubon magazine. My membership, of course, also gave me access to the local Society meetings, which I attended for a while. To tell the truth, however, I always left those meetings with a feeling of sadness. I didn’t attend long enough to really develop any significant personal relationships with other members, but the impression I received was that few, if any, were followers of Christ.

All seemed to be thoroughgoing naturalists in the philosophical meaning of that word. Nature provided them with their highest source of joy and practically functioned as their god. And when speakers would come and talk of the decline of this or that bird species or the continuing degradation of the natural world created by careless people, gloom settled on everyone.

If nature is the highest good and you believe that nature is all there is, it’s easy to understand why general depression presses down on you. If there is no hope beyond the material world we live in, the degradation of the earth leads to the degradation of hope.

Here’s how Lewis explained it at the conclusion of chapter nine in his book Miracles:

Only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little away from her, and then turn around and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her.

Come out, look back, and then you will see: this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas [and birds]; this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads. How could you ever have thought this was the ultimate reality? How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as scientists tell us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creature, this ogress, this [saucy girl], this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch.

But the theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. The ‘vanity’ to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence…. We shall still be able to recognize our old enemy, friend, playfellow and foster mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more, herself. And that will be a merry meeting.

That is the joy of hope that resides in the heart of those who serve and love the true and living God. So we are indeed saddened to see the creation degraded and abused and species formed by the design and power of the Creator driven into extinction by our carelessness, greed, and over-consumption. But because we know the Creator and we know the hope that even nature has for its redemption and renewal in the coming Kingdom (Romans 8:18ff), that sadness ought to act as a motivation for us to once again become the stewards of creation we were intended to be.

Francis Schaeffer believed that it should compel us to be involved even before the consummation in a “substantial healing” of all the rifts created by the Fall. It was this truth about the natural world that was in part the motivation for Lewis to write the Narnia series where a perfected natural world in tandem with the lovers of Aslan cooperated to defeat evil. The same understanding also works its way through Lewis’ less popular “Ransom Trilogy”—his three science fiction novels: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

As I write these words, I am sitting at my sister-in-law Shirley’s dining room table looking out on a frozen Manitowaning Bay from her home on Ontario’s Manitoulin Island at the top of Lake Huron.  The sun is shining but is filtered through a haze of snow dust sparkling in the air. 

Nature is in the deep freeze now, but we have God’s promise: spring will come; warmth will return; butterflies and bees will grace our days again. While we wait, though, I’d like to recommend that you read some Lewis books or MacDonald novels to help lift your spirits and remind you of the coming eternal spring. If you haven’t read Lewis’ science fiction series, give it a try—reading them in the order I’ve given above. Lewis again:

Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds, and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be overwhelmed and, after a certain age, nine times out of ten, nothing will happen to you. (The Four Loves, ch. 2, para. 28)

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows (Matthew 10:29-31).

I love just about anything scientific: ornithology, zoology, botany, meteorology, astronomy. When I go outside, I hardly know what to look at: the birds, the clouds, the animals, the trees, or the night sky! Many Christians, however, have a bad attitude about science. They think that because so many outspoken scientists are atheists, science must somehow lead to disbelief in God. Not so. In fact, the Apostle Paul points out that the natural world is itself evidence for the existence of God (Rom 1:21).

My Three R’s

I’ve found that three R’s help me keep my biblical focus about the natural world: regard, respect, relationship.

Regard: The Bible tells us that God attends the death of a sparrow. Think of that! If the great Originator of the sparrow also attends its death, how can we care less? Most of the species extinctions mankind has witnessed are the result of our failure to give attention to what God gives His attention to. Learning to love what the Creator loves can only increase the intensity of our spiritual experiences. Think of all the biblical stories where people met God in the wilderness. Could it be that we often miss the voice of God because we are regarding only human entertainments and artifacts?

Respect: George MacDonald, 19th century Christian author whose writing inspired C. S. Lewis, had a reverent respect for the natural world. He wrote, “The flowers are joyous, inarticulate children, come with vague messages from the Father of all. If I confess that what they say to me sometimes makes me weep, how can I call my feeling for them anything but love?” The LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made (Psalm 145:9).

Relationship: Evangelical theologian John Stott is an avid birder who motivated the founder of A Rocha, a Christian nature conservancy. He writes, “Christian people should surely have been in the vanguard of the movement for environmental responsibility, because of our doctrines of creation and stewardship. Did God make the world? Does He sustain it? Has He committed its resources to our care? His personal concern for His own creation should be sufficient to inspire us to be equally concerned.”

Our relationship to the natural world is that of steward—the one who is responsible to care for what God has made. Homo sapiens is the only responsible species. How responsible have we been?

To Adam [the Creator] said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.  It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:17-19).

I have a theory.  Think it through with me as I try to squeeze a lot of theology, philosophy, and sociology into a short space.  One of the most significant aspects of man’s fall into sin was our Creator’s curse.  Because we know that God works out all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, and because we know He loves the creature made in His image, we can believe this curse was for a beneficial purpose and was ultimately an act of love.

It is pretty obvious that the while the curse made a great impact on the natural order, nature itself did not sin.  Man is fallen, not nature.  Nature is cursed, but it is cursed to discipline sinful man—sending him out of the Garden where the living was easy and life perpetual into the wider world which would now resist his efforts to wrest it to his own glory, selfishly hoard it, and destroy its fruitfulness.  Sinful, self-centered man having perpetual life and easy access to all the fruit of the earth was a disaster in the making; so God did two other things to protect His creation from the evil of sinful man: He closed the Garden and prevented re-entry with His armed angelic host, and He took away our access to the tree of life: daily sustenance that would give mankind unending life (and which, praise God, we will once again have access to according to the last chapter of the Bible) .

Here’s my theory: God said we will make our living by hard labor being reminded of our sin by facing a natural world that would in many ways be hostile to us; and we said “No way.”  So immediately we put our creative powers to work to make “labor-saving” and “time saving” devices.  The rest is history, as they say.

We have saved so much labor by our cleverness that we’re now destroying the earth with it:  Creating chemicals that are a lethal influence in our environment.  Burning fossil fuels to run our powerful engines each doing the work of hundreds or thousands of people and fouling our air, fishing out our oceans, and wiping out our forests.  Creating huge machines that do the “gardening” for us and turning them over to irresponsible corporations motivated only by monetary profit, while we cocoon ourselves in our cities with purblind eyes that do not bother to see what is happening to our soil.  Making appliances that keep families out of the kitchen and keep us from working side by side with those we love to make our meals and wash our dishes.  And we leave all that and take our children to restaurant chains the purpose of which is to make money for stock holders and which waste millions of pounds of food and paper every day.

And what have we done with the labor and time saved?  Where to find clues: Facebook, sports, entertainment, TV, video gaming, perpetual travel, shopping temples, and . . . .

I’m going to leave that there for now—just to keep your mental gears in motion.  I’d love to have many readers of WOC take up this idea and start a good discussion on this post in the comments box.  Do you think that we have become a fat and loveless culture in part because we have spurned the love of our Creator, who was wise enough to know that our avaricious nature needed the discipline of the curse that we have worked so hard to overturn?  Dig into your Bibles for this one.

To be continued (with apologies to Shakespeare for snitching his title).

What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no man lives, a desert with no one in it, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen? (Job 38:24-30)

In our condo’s patio area the squirrels are robbing the big sunflower seeds I put out for the cardinals; tufted titmouses (titmice?), nuthatches, and chickadees are trading turns at the feeder; the yew bushes are slumped to the ground again after yesterday’s  one-foot snowfall; our neighbor’s crabapple tree is providing cover for forty-some sparrows, twenty-some juncos, a couple pairs of cardinals, and a few house finches; the golf course behind us is in deep hibernation providing for our eyes a sort of frozen Zen garden; and the snow-laden clouds have grudgingly given way to reveal an almost royal blue sky allowing our star to reflect blinding brightness into unshielded eyes.

This is my place on the earth—the place I’m most intimate with. Since I grew up at the edge of town and spent much of my spare time in pastures, woodlands, and wetlands, I’m probably more broadly aware of the natural aspects of my place than the average person.  Most folks I know likely did not experience falling through pond ice into the mush of a partially submerged muskrat hut and have to walk a half mile home with frozen pant legs clacking against each other and rubbing their legs raw.  So I know that the ice is always thinner around the edges of muskrat huts.  And I also know that inept milking of Ayrshire cattle with impossibly small teats does the same stiffening thing to your pants—besides making them smell terribly sour!  When the wind comes up as it’s supposed to do today, I know enough not to walk under snow-bent conifer boughs unless I am prepared for an avalanche from the overburdened branches.

But who needs that kind of knowledge today?  And what does the lack of such a need have to say about our manner of living and our understanding of the true nature of our places?  Wendell Berry is one who in his writing has taken me further than anyone else in understanding that one cannot really have or understand “community” if the natural world around us is not included in that community—deliberately included, not by necessity or by accident.  Berry writes: “Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed.” Wendell Berry, “The Regional Motive” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 67

If you’ve not discovered the writings of Wendell Berry, but want to treat yourself—and challenge your heart and conscience—begin to familiarize yourself with his works.  Berry is a Christian and biblical in his worldview, though he likely would not claim the designation “evangelical.”  But if we learned only from the works and thoughts of evangelicals—especially in the area of caring for creation and seeing the importance and place of nature in what we call “our community”—we would suffer from an extreme lack of knowledge and understanding.

Below are a couple of articles to start with.

This one will really put the mind and heart into high gear:
Christianity and the Survival of Creation

This is one of my favorites—from Sierra Magazine.  It includes one of the finest articulations of the right to life that I have read, and raised a ruckus with many of the magazine’s pro-choice readers:
The Obligation of Care

Much more can be gleaned from “his” Website.
[Note the disclaimer--that it is the site of his fans, not his.  Berry shuns computers.]

Let me leave you with a quote—one of his more popular poems, and one of my favorites:

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

[Wood drake: E. J. Peiker.  See his wonderful nature photography at his Photos of the Month site]

The LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.  And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food (Genesis 2:8-9)

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse (Romans 1:20)

I believe the key element in our recovering the lost theology of nature—a loss that is evident in our often insensitive and utilitarian approach to the natural world—is to recognize that the beauty of the created world is evidence of the Creator himself.  It’s significant that in the Genesis creation account the first fact mentioned about the trees of the garden was that they were “pleasing to the eye” (Gen. 2:9). Yes, they were “good for food,” but apparently what was most striking to Adam and Eve was their beauty.

It’s a worthy goal for us to regularly regard the beauty of the creation before we consider its utility.  It was this approach to the natural world that motivated John Muir to become a successful lobbyist in making Yosemite a national park—an approach that millions of people since that time have been grateful for. This same understanding led to the creation of all our national parks.  The utilitarian approach to Yellowstone, for instance, could have compelled some entrepreneurs to consider it more valuable as a massive geothermal power plant than a park.

"Falls of the Kaaterskill" Thomas Cole, 1826

John Muir believed that “everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”  The value of natural beauty to the human soul was what inspired the masterful landscape painter Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of painting.  With his paintings he wanted to put people back in touch with the Creator.  He hoped his paintings would give city-dwelling admirers a yearning for the outdoors where they too could discover what he had—that “in gazing on the pure creations of the Almighty, he feels a calm religious tone steal through his mind, and when he has turned to mingle [again] with his fellow men, the chords which have been struck in that sweet communion cease not to vibrate.”

Maybe that’s why I admire Cole’s paintings and not Picasso’s.  If we saw something like a Picasso in nature, we’d know at once it did not come from God’s hands!  Beauty may be nature’s most profound apologist for God.

[Old growth trees photo source: cramsay23]
[Clearcut forest photo source]