God’s relation to creation, and ours
By Martin Davie, Reflections of an Anglican theologian:
Last week, the Bishop of Reading, Olivia Graham, posted a video on behalf of Oxford diocese in which she looked at the theological basis for Christian care for the environment. In the course of this video she suggested that a reason that Christians should care for the environment is that God is ‘incarnate,’ not only in the person of Jesus Christ, but in creation as a whole, and has been ever since the Big Bang.[1]
What she said provoked much criticism on the grounds that it undermined the basic Christian claim that God was, and is, uniquely present in the person of Christ. In the light of this criticism Bishop Graham posted a clarification on the Oxford Diocese website in which she conceded that her use of the term ’incarnation’ had been unhelpful, and explained that what she meant was that ‘the Divine pervades every part of the universe, while clearly being above, beyond and greater than the universe.’[2]
Bishop Graham’s original video and her subsequent clarification leave us with three questions that I shall consider in the remained of this post.
First, what does it mean to say that God ‘pervades every part of the universe’?
Secondly, what is the basis for our care for creation if it is not the case that the creation is the incarnation of God?
Thirdly, what form does our care for creation need to take?
[…] What all this means is that it would not be correct to say that we as human beings should care for the rest of creation because God is present in creation in a way that means that we could point to a tree, a rabbit, or a mollusc, and say ‘that is God.’ As we have seen, God and creation are distinct and they should never be identified (which is the reason for the prohibition in Exodus 1:4-5 of worshipping any idol made to represent ‘anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth’).
The reason we should care for creation is instead laid out for us in the first two chapters of the book of Genesis, chapters which set the stage for the rest of the biblical account of what it means to live rightly before God.
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