At the crossroads of creation and scripture

Review of So We and our Children May Live: Following Jesus in Confronting the Climate Crisis, Sarah Augustine and Sheri Hostetler (Herald Press, 2023), and God the Creator: The Old Testament and the World God is Making, Ben C. Ollenburger (Baker Academic, 2023)

As I have grown up and explored Christian faith and discipleship, the word “creation” has had two major senses. If I heard the word “creation,” that is, I was about to have one of two conversations. One of these conversations was typically exhortative: a call to action to protect creation, or a discussion about how best to “care for creation.” The other conversation was combative: an attempted debate between the ideas of “creation” and “evolution,” with the “new atheists” on the offensive and Christian apologists on the defensive. Could I, in a secular, Western, modern world, really believe that God created the world? Or in other words: what does a supernatural God have to do with nature? These two conversations, though related through the word “creation,” remained mostly uninterested in each other, with their own concerns and their own axes to grind. Two books are under review here, and while each initially seems to hew closely to their own sense of “creation” (the first to “creation care” and the second to “creation theology”), both go beyond the simplistic assumptions of the two conversations. Through these two books, the two conversations may be mutually illuminated.

Sarah Augustine and Sheri Hostetler tell us in their first paragraph that their joint project is the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. This co-authored book is a part of that broader project, which has included documentaries, plays, speaking engagements, podcasts, trainings, and protests. Their education has centered on decolonization, and they wrote this book to emphasize that decolonization is not just a good idea, it is essential for human survival. They draw the connection between colonization – not just the action, but the worldview of colonization – and the climate crisis that threatens our species. That is, their project of decolonization is essential to “care for creation” and maintain a livable planet for humanity. The title of the book is drawn from Deuteronomy 30:19, when Moses exhorts the Israelites: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” Colonization doesn’t just threaten “the colonized,” it damages creation and threatens to destroy human life as we know it. For any who seek “creation care,” decolonization is essential. Augustine and Hostetler call on many sources to invite the reader in: scripture, tradition, modern politics, indigenous wisdom, and their own visions and poetry.

Augustine and Hostetler invite those who care about creation into the work of decolonization. They do this in three steps. In the first part, they name that “The Climate Crisis is the Symptom – Not Source – of the Problem” (33), and invite the reader to ponder systems that lead to life and to death. In the second part, they emphasize their point by naming many problems with the most popular proposed solutions to the climate crisis, referred to as Green (economic)Growth. In the third part, they address decolonization directly: what it means, how to imagine it, and how to live in hope. Taken together, these three parts are a sobering challenge to complacency, and a reminder that “common sense” will not get us out of our problems, if we’re relying on the same “common sense” that got us into them. Imagination and action – creativity – are necessary to address the “creation care” mess we’re in.

Ben Ollenburger reminds us in his first paragraph of the old-fashioned argument between “creation” and “evolution” from the Scopes Monkey Trial in the early 20th century. He quickly acknowledges the other sense of “creation” in contemporary Christianity, “Creation Care.” Though he has no argument against talking about creation care, he does state clearly that it will not be what his book is about. “My focus will be on God the Creator” (2), he says. Specifically, his purpose is to listen carefully to scripture as it portrays God as creator, not just “in the beginning” but from beginning to end. This is also a much different project than trying to claim that the Bible contests against “science” or that it provides a “scientific” account of the world’s origins.

Ollenburger dedicates each chapter to how a different portion of scripture speaks of God as creator. The first three chapters of the book are on the first three chapters of Genesis, but the remaining work through the rest of scripture: God the creator in Wisdom, in Psalms, in the Prophets, in Apocalypse and in scripture beyond the Old Testament. This is a book of biblical theology, whose purpose is first to read carefully and understand deeply the biblical portrait of God. Calls to action and “therefores” for our current day are further steps, which the author usually declines to make.

How, then, do these books speak to one another? There are two primary meeting points in this conversation: “creation” and scripture. At first, the conversation doesn’t seem promising. When discussing the early chapters of Genesis, Augustine and Hostetler are less interested in discovering a complex biblical portrait of God and God’s creation – as Ollenburger is – and more interested in working against interpretations of those texts that have contributed to colonialism and the abuse of creation. The different emphases of the two authors mean that they have different questions, and are not talking directly to one another.

The conversation really gets interesting, though, when Ollenberger begins to discuss the prophets. One example is in Ollenburger’s chapter on Isaiah, called “Royal Theology.” When he discusses Isaiah 40, for example, he points out that Isaiah calls the nations “less than nothing” and “emptiness.” The Hebrew word for emptiness here, tohu, is a deliberate reminder of Genesis 1:2, the pre-creation chaos, inhospitable to life, into which God speaks a word of creation. It may seem bizarre to call the nations that ordered Ancient Near Eastern geopolitics “nothingness” and disorder. But the prophet says this as a message to the powerless exiles of the Israelites, forcibly removed from their land by the Babylonian empire (Ollenburger 137-139). A reader of both books might draw a connection with Augustine and Hostetler’s comments about modern nation-states and international governing bodies’ inability to grant justice to indigenous people. If economic growth is a widely agreed-upon “good,” and nation-states allow corporations to extract resources from indigenous land in the name of economic growth, even through violent removal of indigenous people, what recourse do those indigenous people have? After discussing the United Nations’ impotence, the authors say this about the Organization of American States (OAS):

Like the United Nations, the OAS serves its constituent nation states. The OAS regulates trade in the Western Hemisphere and composes and convenes the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. the same member states regulate both. when constituents like Indigenous Peoples appeal to the Inter-American Court, they must navigate an institution where the member states who hear their claim are the same member states who have perpetrated human rights abuses.” (189)

If God’s creation is that which leads to life and wholeness, then the indigenous people may indeed say that the nations are tohu, emptiness. Augustine and Hostetler differentiate between true reality (life and that which makes for the flourishing of life) and false reality (the social systems and values that lead to death but that we take for granted. Ollenburger discusses “order” and “perverted order.” Just because something is ordered does not mean it is as it should be. Both Isaiah and those working for indigenous justice today agree. Perverted order is seen in the displacement and destruction of people for the sake of national power.

These two books do speak well to one another, and this reflection on “the nations” is just one example. Ollenburger discusses apocalyptic works in scripture, such as Daniel, while Augustine and Hostetler likewise dedicate time to imagining the end of systems of death and the emergence of systems of life. Some interesting tensions between the books emerge as well. For example, Ollenburger’s discussion of Isaiah emphasizes God the creator as “King,” while Augustine and Hostetler avoid the word “Kingdom” of God, preferring “kindom.” Both honest and faithful reflections on the nature of God, yet they demonstrate different contexts and values. How are we to honor both? Another distinction between the books is that there is a much broader biblical portrait of God the Creator in Ollenburger than fits in the argument being made by Augustine and Hostetler. Readers of God the Creator will have to grapple with God’s primordial battle with the sea, for example, or God the Creator’s confrontation with Job, the suffering human.

Augustine and Hostetler are working as modern-day prophets: through story, argument, vision and poetry calling us to recognize the injustice of our world, and summoning us to imagine a world of life and shalom. Their book is valuable to those seeking to learn more about creation care or indigenous justice, and most especially to see how those concerns are related. Ollenburger’s book is one of biblical interpretation, digging into the arguments and perspectives of the biblical text. It is a denser read, and full of insight on the Bible’s portrait of a creating God.

We live in a time when creation seems to be in trouble. Is it a climate crisis? Is it a social crisis? A moral crisis? Or is it, perhaps, a theological crisis? Reading these two books, I suggest that it is all of the above. We can learn a great deal by bringing these books into conversation with one another, and ourselves into conversation with them. Perhaps a new light – maybe even a light of a new creation – could shine on the crises we face today.