This blog post is a talk given to St. Paul’s parish, Haywards Heath
However, the first two chapters of Genesis are vital. If we forget that creation is an order willed by God, we will think about the world fundamentally the wrong way.
The creation story is a myth: it is not literally true, but it contains fundamental truths at the core of Christian belief. They include:
- The world is the way it is because God created it that way
- Creation is a gift – and a gift that God declared to be good. He said at the end of each day: “He saw that it was good.”
- We are at the pinnacle of creation: we can reason; we can truly know God; we have souls; and we have free will. If these things were not so, our religion would be irrelevant.
This is the starting point for thinking about the calling to care for creation.
We should develop a relationship to the rest of the created order in such a way that we live truly fulfilled and dignified lives. We can use nature to improve our lives. But we need to have a right relationship with the created order, or we are disrespecting a gift which God thinks is good, and which He gave to us for our proper use.
We should also never forget that the created order is not just random: it has a purpose, and a design. We believe in evolution, of course. But evolution merely confirms the complementarity of different aspects of creation – they all fit together.
Pope Francis brought this together in Laudato si, when he wrote:
Saint Thomas Aquinas wisely noted that multiplicity and variety [in creatures] “come from the intention of the first agent [God]” who willed that “what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another”, inasmuch as God’s goodness “could not be represented fittingly by any one creature”. Hence we need to grasp the variety of things in their multiple relationships. We understand better the importance and meaning of each creature if we contemplate it within the entirety of God’s plan.
So, this, fundamentally, is where the call to care for creation comes from. We are part of an order willed by God. And, being at the top of that order, we have a call to care for it appropriately.
Church teaching on the environment – three themes
The Church has been writing about the environment in her documents since 1971, and the themes have been consistent. Here, I will briefly mention three themes.
The first theme is the importance of ordering our lives appropriately when it comes to the consumption of material things. This was probably best explained by John Paul II in Centesimus annus. He wrote:
Equally worrying is the ecological question which accompanies the problem of consumerism….In his desire to have and to enjoy rather than to be and to grow, man consumes the resources of the earth…in an excessive and disordered way…Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray.
We are entitled to use the created order for our material needs, but this needs to be in the context of lives which put God at the centre, so that our priority is to grow properly as persons and in relationship with God and not try to become happy by having more material things. If we attempt to become happy by acquiring more and more material things we will abuse and destroy the created order – and we won’t be happy either.
Secondly, there is the question of technology. There are luddites within the environmental movement, but the Church is not luddite. Again, this is Pope Francis in Laudato si:
We are the beneficiaries of two centuries of enormous waves of change: steam engines, railways, the telegraph, electricity, automobiles, aeroplanes, chemical industries, modern medicine, information technology and, more recently, the digital revolution, robotics, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies. It is right to rejoice in these advances…
And the Church does not condemn, for example, genetically modified crops. But we should not allow technology come between us and God; we should not use it for immoral purposes (such as creating pornography in the case of AI or killing people indiscriminately in the case of nuclear weapons); and we should not assume that all technical advances are genuinely human advances. We have a duty to ensure that technical progress is subject to moral laws. If we do not ensure this, it can destroy the balance of the created order.
And this takes us on to what might be called “human ecology”, a strong interest of each of Popes John Paul II, Benedict and Francis. As Pope Francis said, perhaps inadvertently borrowing from Lenin: “everything is connected to everything else”. And environmental issues and life issues are connected. There are many fine quotations from each of these three popes, but, perhaps, this one from Pope Benedict is the best summary:
In order to protect nature…the decisive issue is the overall moral tenor of society. If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology…The book of nature is one and indivisible.
This really takes us back to the beginning. What did our creator intend? Are we just here by accident? Can we just do what we like to radically change the nature of God’s creation or is there an order that he intends? Some of the experiments which are now going on with the creation of so-called synthetic embryos (human embryos created without womb, sperm or egg, described in the Guardian as a “groundbreaking advance”) are really frightening. Indeed, we might ask whether these experiments are not like the first sin of eating from the tree of knowledge – that is, humans wanting to be God.
The call of creation
The starting point when it comes to thinking about how to address environmental issues is a call to conversion. This is how the Catholic Bishops’ Conference document “The Call of Creation” puts it: “The crisis we face is a summons to a profound interior conversion, whereby the effects of our relationship with Jesus Christ become evident in our relationship with the world around us.”
Our calling is to find fulfilment and true happiness in our relationship with God. One aspect of that is having an appropriate relationship with His creation – and learning to love and appreciate it. The first couple of chapters of Genesis set the context for this. We are better people, and have a better relationship with God, if we treat creation with respect. To quote Pope Francis in Laudato si: “The human person grows more, matures more and is sanctified more to the extent that he or she enters into relationships, going out from themselves to live in communion with God, with others and with all creatures.”
This might be unsatisfying for those who want to save the world from the climate crisis or change the world in various ways. We might think we can’t do a great deal in relation to the magnitude of the problem. However, whatever we do, as well as being good in itself and important for our relationship with God, contributes to changing culture. As Pope Francis also wrote: “We must not think that these efforts [to care for creation] are not going to change the world. They benefit society, often unbeknown to us, for they call forth a goodness which, albeit unseen, inevitably tends to spread.”
