by Noah Guthrie
Our tuxedo cat, Gretl, has many quirks. She still suckles her fur at the age of seven, stretches herself across the stairs right as you go down, and casually walks away from you after meowing for attention. She also enjoys Christmas hymns. When the winter holidays come and my family sings around a wreath of pink and purple Advent candles, Gretl will often pad toward us to listen. She’ll flick her black, white-tipped tail as though it were a needle weaving our voices together.
This habit of Gretl’s may be one of the reasons my younger sisters sometimes gush, “She’s a Christian cat!” Their words are playful, but they suggest a serious question.
What does Christ mean for non-human creatures? If we’re to go a step further, we may also wonder: how does the Bible shape our understanding of the more-than-human world as a whole, with its soils, waters, and interlocking landscapes?
Like many of those involved with the Rabbit Room, I’m a creative writer, and I also work for a faith-based environmental nonprofit called A Rocha USA. Whatever the Bible says about nature, I believe it impacts both aspects of my work: art and conservation. In light of that, my hope for this post is to offer an overview of the biblical basis for environmental advocacy, starting with creation, progressing to the Israelite land ethic, then concluding with the cosmic scope of Jesus’ salvation.
Creation and its Caretakers
Luckily, we don’t have to go far in the Bible to figure out God’s views on nature. At the very start of the Torah, we find that nature is God’s creation (Gen. 1:1), that it’s diverse and overflowing with life (Gen. 1:21, 1:25), and that it’s good, good, good, and very good (Gen. 1:4, 1:10, 1:12, 1:31).
In Genesis, nature’s value doesn’t hinge on its usefulness to human beings. Well before humans even come into existence (which happens on the “sixth day” of the narrative), God sees all of creation—plants, animals, terrains, and astral bodies—as “good.” Moreover, God blesses the birds and sea creatures independently of humans (Gen. 1:22), and he makes a covenant with all the creatures that emerge from Noah’s ark (Gen. 9:8-11). This indicates that all sorts of non-human species, whether in land, sky, or sea, are recipients of God’s blessings and covenant faithfulness.
While God does distinguish humans as bearers of the imago dei (Gen. 1:26-7), much of the Genesis creation account establishes the commonalities between human and non-human creatures. As David Clough observes in the first volume of his theological treatise On Animals, the Hebrew in these passages refers to both humans and non-humans as nephesh hayyah, or “living creatures” (Clough 31). God shapes all of these creatures from dust and divine breath (Gen. 1:30, 2:7, 2:19), and Genesis describes all of them as eating, reproducing, and bearing God’s approval as “good” creations.
In short, Genesis doesn’t depict nature as a mere tool for human ends—or worse, a temporary, carnal “test” posed to humanity before they can escape to a world of pure spirit. Instead, it describes nature as a tapestry of lands, species, and energies that are each good in and of themselves. Moreover, humans are created as one member of a family of dust-and-spirit creatures, nephesh hayyah, and they receive the responsibility to “work and keep” the land where God has placed them (Gen. 2:15). Since they’re made in the image of servant-king (Gen. 1.27; cf. John 13:13-14), we may infer that God intends humanity to emulate Jesus’ sacrificial love in their “dominion” over the earth’s creatures (Gen. 1:28).
Just as Adam and Eve’s sin results in the “cursing” of the ground (Gen. 3:17-18), many environmental issues start with humanity’s failure to obey that ancient call to lovingly “work and keep” the land. During my recent internship with A Rocha USA, I’ve seen how human action has “cursed” the Indian River Lagoon in Florida, where seagrass withers and oyster reefs collapse, and where vulnerable species like the butterfly ray and horseshoe crab swim in polluted waters. I’ve also seen meadows clotted with invasive King Ranch bluestem, and Texan forests tarred with the shadows of invasive glossy privet.
A massive glossy privet (Ligustrum lucidum) growing in the Stenis Tract of Austin, Texas. This species takes over Texan ecosystems and shades out native plants.
As part of my habitat restoration work, I was tasked with killing these glossy privets, knowing all the while that this was a tree that God created good, and which God desired to “be fruitful and multiply” in its native habitat of East Asia. Now that humans have brought this species to the U.S., though, it’s strangled so many biotic communities.
(You can read more about A Rocha USA’s work in Florida and Texas using the embedded StoryMap links.)
The Israelite Land Ethic
When we read further in the Torah, Eve and Adam’s responsibility to care for the soil becomes part of the covenant between God and the people of Israel. In Stewards of Eden, Sandra L. Richter explains that the Israelite land ethic “emerged from their understanding that Canaan was a land grant … If the nation will keep Yahweh’s commandments, they will keep the land” (Richter 15-16; cf. Deut. 5:31-33). Conversely, if Israel disobeyed God’s commands, the land would “vomit” them out (Lev. 18:26-28).
That’s why it’s so significant that the ethical treatment of creatures and landscapes is woven into Israelite law. Among its commands are those to allow livestock to rest on the Sabbath (Deut. 5:13-14), to give the land itself a Sabbath year (Lev. 25:2-5), and to spare mother birds (Deut. 22:6-7). Richter interprets the latter to be an instance of pars pro toto, being just “one expression of a larger principle” that Israel should protect their ecosystem’s ability to sustain life (Richter 53). Though there are some human benefits to these laws (for instance, letting farmland lie fallow preserves its fertility), the adamant “good,” “good,” and “very good” of Genesis challenges us to consider that, to some degree, these laws exist due to God’s love for the animals and soils themselves.
During an earlier conservation internship in 2018, I saw this biblical land ethic put into practice at the Brooksdale Environmental Centre, one of A Rocha Canada’s programs in British Columbia. Brooksdale is a tiny village of cream-and-cocoa-hued homes bordered by Douglas firs. While the Tatalu River flows through a wetland on one side, an organic farm burgeons on the other.
The wetland is home to three-spined sticklebacks, frogs, and the endangered Salish sucker with its bronze glow, and the farm is home to all manner of vegetables. Carrots flourish their fronds, eggplants polish their violet glaze, jalapeños coil like gymnasts on the stalk, and the golden husks of squashes swell from the soil, echoing the ancient promises of a land flowing with honey.
The organic farm of the Brooksdale Environmental Centre is in Surrey, British Columbia.
By planting native maples and removing invasive sunfish, by leading children on hikes through the firs, by studying local birds, bats, and frogs, and by raising their crops in a way that nourishes the life of the soil, Brooksdale practices a philosophy that echoes the Bible: if we’re to live long in this land, we need to tend to it with compassion and prudence.
The Salvation of the Cosmos
To be fair, there are few Christians who would seriously suggest that God’s creation isn’t “good,” or that humans don’t have some obligation to care for it, or at least steward it wisely. The real hangup is the question of who Jesus came to save. Sure, he might have a liking for the lilies of the field, but his true mission is to save humans and take them to heaven, right?
Paul’s epistles, however, call to question the idea that Jesus’ only goal is to save humanity. In Colossians, Paul describes Jesus not only as the force that sustains all that exists (Col. 1:16-17), but also as the means by which God “reconcile[s] to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20). Though theologians debate about the exact meaning of “all things” in this context, the Greek term that Paul uses, ta panta, is usually all-encompassing, and the chapter’s earlier references to creation imply that Jesus’ act of reconciliation occurs on a cosmic scale.
Elsewhere, Paul describes the reconciliation of “all things” in heaven and earth as part of Christ’s preordained salvific plan (Eph. 1:7-10). He also teaches that all of creation is “groaning” in anticipation of divine rescue, and that “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:19-23). The same passage makes a distinction between Paul’s human audience and the groaning “creation” (Rom. 8:23), so it seems unlikely that “creation” (or ktisis, in Greek) refers to the broken creatureliness of humanity. The more likely interpretation is that this is Paul’s response to the “cursed ground” of Genesis 3:17—that someday, the sufferings that humans have inflicted on God’s world will come to an end.
Such a cosmic view of salvation is startling. The famed theologian John Wesley was so inspired by this passage from Romans that he exclaimed, “Nothing is more sure, than that as ‘the Lord is loving to every man,’ so ‘his mercy is over all his works;’ all that have sense, all that are capable of pleasure or pain, of happiness or misery” (Wesley, “The General Deliverance”). Indeed, if Paul is really saying that all that exists will be liberated and reconciled to God, then Christ’s mission is to rescue all that breathes.
What would this liberated creation look like? When our present ecosystems are filled with agony and death—when they require death, in fact, to keep functioning—it’s hard to imagine what kind of changes would enable all species to coexist without suffering. Debra Rienstra, in her book Refugia Faith, responds to this question by asserting, “There be plenty of dragons beyond the edges of our theological and scriptural maps” (Rienstra 173). I can’t help but agree: whatever it means for God to “make all things new” (Rev. 21:5), it’s beyond our imagination.
As mysterious as these promises may be, they do hint that Jesus’ kingdom—once it arrives in fullness—will look less like clouds and winged ghosts, and more like a community of healed creatures in restored landscapes. It may look like the cerulean swathes of bluebonnets that A Rocha restored in Central Texas. It may look like an Indian River Lagoon rife with oyster-beds, swarming with horseshoe crabs, and lush with seagrass. It may look like the hardy soils of Brooksdale, which don’t wash away in the rain, but overflow with squash, celeriac, kale, and aubergine. It may even look like a small tuxedo cat, bobbing her tail to the tune of the old hymn:
“No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found…”
This is Christ's vision for the universe, and this is the work that we—as members of Christ's body—are called to enter into, nurturing and restoring all creatures.
The Stenis Tract of Austin, Texas, overrun with invasive King Ranch bluestem.
The Stenis Tract, 11 months after A Rocha’s invasives removal and wildflower planting.
Noah Guthrie works as the Nashville Conservation Coordinator for A Rocha USA, supporting their communications team and bolstering their new Churches of Restoration program. The latter project empowers Nashville congregations to advocate for local and global ecosystems, both within their churches and in the broader community. For any who feel led to support Noah in his role, you can find his fundraising page at arocha.us/guthrie.
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