In addition to theocentricity and what I’ve called a “qualified” anthropocentrism, any Christian ethic of creation needs to address the issue of the “fallenness” of creation. This is a controversial topic since, while most theologians have no problem with the idea of human fallenness (in some sense), the idea that the non-human creation is somehow not what it should be seems to smack of pre-modern mythological thinking. Given what we know about the scientific laws of the universe, do we need to posit some pre-historic cosmic cataclysm to explain the existence of suffering, predation, death, natural disasters and the like? The view sometimes put forth that all these things are somehow the result of human (or maybe angelic) sin seems incredible to many Christians.

However, I don’t think we can dismiss the idea of a cosmic Fall so easily. If we take nature as it is, how do we reconcile the presence of so much suffering and death with the existence of a Creator of unlimited love and power? Certain modernist theologians have contended that a universe structured the way ours is, with all its attendant pain and suffering, is necessary to bring into existence rational, personal creatures who can respond to and enter into a relationship with the Divine. This line of thought is supported by the oft-noted “anthropic” features of the cosmos that make it appear to be “fine-tuned” for the emergence of life. But this is unsatisfactory for a couple of reasons. First, it seems to relegate the entire non-human creation to a mere ancillary role in God’s plan. Second, as it stands it doesn’t address the moral issue raised by the suffering of so many sentient creatures, who, on this telling, are mere means to the creation of rational beings like ourselves.

If I can wax Anselmian for a minute, it strikes me as “unfitting” that God would create solely to bring into existence human beings (and perhaps other rational creatures elsewhere) but have no additional purposes for creation. The Bible, for one, seems to envision a redeemed creation, not simply a redeemed humanity.

Another attempt to have Christian theology without the Fall is found in the “creation spirituality” of Matthew Fox. Fox posits an “original blessing” (as opposed to original sin) and thinks that we should embrace the ethos of nature as unambiguously good and not in need of redemption. Unfortunately, this and similar views border on pantheism and nature worship and overlook the fact that deriving our ethics from the natural world can yield cruelty as much as compassion. Nature is God’s good creation, but it’s also “red in tooth and claw” and can’t set the standard for our ethics or theology in any straightforward way.

But does this mean that there was some pre-historical state of perfection from which the created world fell, as the result of human or angelic sin? David B. Hart has defended such an idea in his book The Doors of the Sea. But, as I argued previously, I think Hart comes dangerously close to gnosticism in his positing of a perfect eternal creation that somehow “preceded” the world as it exists now. It’s hard, on Hart’s account, to identify the empirical world we see around us with God’s good creation. Just as our doctrince of original sin shouldn’t efface the basic goodness of human nature, any doctrince of cosmic fall and redemption shouldn’t obscure the goodness of the world as we actually experience it.

The view I lean toward is that creation is good, but incomplete and in need of redemption, or deliverance from evil. God’s world will not ultimately contain the evils of suffering and death, but this is because it will be transformed, not annihilated. This view doesn’t require the existence of a pre-historic cosmic fall, but it does see the story of the Fall as containing the important truth that creation is unfinished and not what it should be. This prevents us from treating death and suffering as “natural” in the deepest sense (and therefore good), but it also avoids Hartian quasi-gnosticism about the natural world.

This implies, at a minimum, that we not take the “struggle for survival” as the template for our thinking about the natural world, much less mimic it in our relationships with one another. But it should also caution us against utopian attempts to remake nature in a way that is free from the inherent limitations of a fallen creation. Nature is neither perfect as it is, but nor is it “fixable” by us. This side of the eschaton it would be pointless and cruel to try and make the lion lie down with the lamb.

But what I think it does point to is that we shouldn’t exacerbate the violence of nature with our own violence. Whatever we think about the story of the Fall, it’s clear that we now have the power to “corrupt” nature with our sinfulness in a very straightforward way. Our ability to change natural processes, to pollute, to deforest, and to manipulate the natures of living creatures far outstips anything our ancestors had, and in all likelihood outstrips our wisdom. But another part of our uniqueness as human beings is our ability to look toward, and in some degree anticipate, that redeemed state that we hope for.

In part three I’ll try to tie some of these threads together…