Paving Paradise

No.121: August 19, 2022

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Dear Friends,

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Paving Paradise

Have you had an opportunity to get out and enjoy nature this summer? A trip to the beach, perhaps, or camping along a river or stream? I was able to take a multi-night backpacking trip with my youngest daughter to a mountain lake at 9,000 feet where we enjoyed two major hailstorms, lightning, and some Moose neighbors. Such experiences always get me to thinking about our relationship with God’s creation.

One of the unique things about a Christian worldview is its understanding of nature. Paganism in all its varieties oscillates between two irreconcilable assessments of the natural world. On the one hand, nature is despised and denigrated. We are spiritual beings entrapped in the material world. Matter and “stuff” is bad. Asceticism or withdrawal, “do not touch, do not taste,” flow from this kind of dualism. On the other hand, and sometimes in the very same breath, nature is deified and considered divine. Earth is personified as our “Mother.”

One moment nature poses no threat or mystery to us—we completely understand it and we stand as “one” with it or invincibly over it. Recall that Peter Atkins quote I’ve mentioned a few times recently about how there is no longer any mystery about nature, and that “everything can be explained” and is “extraordinarily simple”? Those are bold claims, but it doesn’t take very long for us to suddenly feel our overwhelming ignorance and vulnerability; note how the James Webb Space Telescope is already producing some head-scratching among cosmologists. And for all our confidence that there is nothing to fear, nature is sometimes just terrifying. Trust me: huddled in a flimsy tent at 9,000 feet with lightning and deafening thunder all around and golf-ball-sized hail coming down in sheets is a pretty worrisome and vulnerable feeling.

The Christian worldview can explain this dynamic. We have an uneasy relationship with nature, proudly dominating it one moment and cowering from it the next, because our relationship to it has been ruptured, disordered, and put out of joint. In a passage that could take weeks to fully unpack, Herman Bavinck explains:

As a result of this [creational] worldview Christianity has overcome both the contempt of nature and its deification. In paganism a human being does not stand in the right relationship to God, and therefore not to the world either. Similarly, in pantheism and materialism the relation of human beings to nature is fundamentally corrupted. One moment man considers himself infinitely superior to nature and believes that it no longer has any secrets for him. The next moment he experiences nature as a dark and mysterious power that he does not understand, whose riddles he cannot solve, and from whose power he cannot free himself. Intellectualism and mysticism alternate. Unbelief makes way for superstition, and materialism turns into occultism.

The Christian, on the other hand, has been reconciled to God, and therefore reconciled to nature. Things have been “put to rights.” The fracture between humanity and creation that occurred at the Fall has been, in principle, mended. Bavinck again:

Here, accordingly, there is room for love and admiration of nature, but all deification is excluded. Here a human being is placed in the right relation to the world because he has been put in the right relation to God.

This is deeply profound, and incredibly important when we think about questions of stewardship of creation or when we address environmental concerns. What is our relationship to the rest of God’s creation? One assumption that permeates contemporary questions about environmental issues is that human beings essentially don’t belong. As we often conceive it, nature is pure and pristine, untouched, and we are interlopers, aberrations, an inherent blight on what is otherwise perfection. We think of ourselves as invaders or “parasites.” Human cultivation is a disruption of nature, at best a necessary “evil.” “Ideal” nature is little or no human involvement or interaction at all.

But this is a false perception. Have you ever noticed this? In the narrative of Genesis 1 God repeatedly stops to evaluate the progress of his works, and he saw that “it was good.” On the sixth day he creates male and female as his image and likeness, and for the first time he directly addresses one of his creations:

God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’

And at the close of this day, God again evaluates his work “and it was very good.” Nature isn’t pristine perfection without humans; nature is incomplete without humans. Genesis 2 tells us that God “planted a garden” and commissioned us to be gardeners. That is, to tend, shape, and cultivate the material world. “Wilderness” in Scripture is a place inhospitable to humans, and therefore is not presented as the ideal state. Quite the opposite: it is desert and wasteland.

This means that human cultivation—by this we might mean human industry—is a creational good, not necessary evil; not inherently destructive, but productive; humans are not alien to nature, but lords and caretakers of it. And it is very important to maintain that this is true even after the Fall. Yes, nature now throws a few obstacles at us: “thorns and thistles,” God says. I like to think of it as a little youthful temper tantrum toward rightful authority. Nevertheless, the earth still yields its fruit to human cultivation. God hasn’t abandoned the creational design.

There is more to say, of course. There was a Fall. There have been and still are sinful abuses of creation, topics that ought to be considered in any full-fledged account of nature. For now I just want to highlight this pervasive and, I would argue, pagan idea that human beings are inherently aliens and strangers to some kind of primitive and “pure” nature.

And that doesn’t mean—as I feel Joni Mitchell’s reproachful glare—that I want to “pave paradise and put up a parking lot.” I love mountains and rivers and streams and meadows and forests and wilderness. But I have to insist that without human industry and cultivation you or I would see or experience very little of it. Roads and bridges and trails and overlooks are among the thousands of ways human cultivation has made the enjoyment of nature possible. Have you ever tried to hike into literally untouched wilderness—the kind where there is no trail? I have, and it is very nearly impossible. Words can hardly describe how thick, rough, and rugged is “untouched” wilderness. Without a trail, there is no memorable backpacking trip with my daughter. Without human cultivation, there is no Yellowstone or Glacier National Park. And what would we do without the manufacturing of shoes and hiking boots and socks and backpacks and tents and sleeping bags and air mattresses and rain jackets and hats and gloves and camp stoves and propane and flashlights and matches and mosquito spray? I know the granolas at REI sometimes say they don’t like corporations and industry and manufacturing, but they wouldn’t have a business without them.

Even if you have in your mind’s eye some pristine, untouched place, rest assured you will never see it without human ingenuity and human cultivation. Just how God intended it.