Theology and Creation Care

Kymberli Cook:
Welcome to The Table podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture. My name is Kymberli Cook and I'm the assistant director here at the Hendricks Center and today, we're going to be talking about creation care, and we're joined by Jonathan Moo, who is a professor of New Testament and environmental studies, not something you see often combined, and occupies the Lindaman Chair at Whitworth University, and he specializes in the intersection between biblical and ecological studies. So thank you so much for joining us today, Jonathan.

Jonathan Moo:
Thanks for having me.

Kymberli Cook:
So, why don't we just start by you telling us a bit about yourself, and how you ended up interested in this intersection of two topics that very much, as we will discuss today, are relevant to one another but often don't seem to be represented in the academy, I guess, I could say.

Jonathan Moo:
Thank you. Yeah, I grew up with just the love of the outdoors, I guess and of fishing and hunting and hiking and spending time in creation, and I grew up in a Christian family but I don't know how much I really connected those two things, my love of the outdoors and of the created world with my faith. But in any case, I so loved nature that I wanted to be a biologist. And so, after a year of actually studying theology in Chicago, I went out west where I'd wanted to go since I was a kid growing up in Chicago, lived in Utah, and worked on a master's in wildlife biology.

Jonathan Moo:
During that time, I mean things that I already was aware of a bit as an undergraduate, just the challenges facing life on earth became more and more evident to me. And even among my biologist friends, any system that they're studying, you kind of inevitably become passionate about. If you're attentive to something, you develop a certain love for it. So, often living with kind of the sorrow of loss that we experience in this time in history, of seeing species disappearing and habitat being degraded and reduced, led to kind of a wrestling for me about what does the Christian faith have to say to that? And in my Christian context at the time, often, well actually, nearly always, it just wasn't talked about. Our gospel was pretty focused, at least for my context on our relationship with God and of the gift of salvation that we have in Christ, and how that transforms us and how it transforms us in a relationship with God and with each other. But there wasn't kind of an attentiveness to the wider context of the gospel that I have since become compelled by. That includes the whole of the cosmos, all of creation, that invites us into a different way of relating to the created world.

Jonathan Moo:
At the same time, maybe more information than you're looking for, I guess, but I went through a real crisis in my faith, being among people who I really respected, you would kind of identify as born again pagans or as atheists, many of my scientific colleagues, a church context that can be wonderful and rich and supportive, but perhaps not just thinking about these sorts of things, how science and faith go together. And ultimately, of course, as most crises in faith really just my own, I think unfaithfulness and probably just not doing the things that I needed to deal with. But what that led to was in the process of studying biology, and I just loved my study of biology and spending much of my time in the mountains, I because of my crisis in faith, started picking up theologians again. And so picked up Aquinas and C.S. Lewis, and began to recognize what an attenuated view of the world I had come to have, I think, and was kind of given back the gift of this vision of the world and all of its wonder and beauty and enchantment, I think also is a word I use for it, that we see the lens of Christ.

Jonathan Moo:
And so through that whole process, kind of wrestling with what my calling was, as a biologist, as someone who had also studied English literature and love the humanities and love that year of theology I'd had in Chicago before I had moved west. Really just there was lots of questions I wanted to explore about science and faith, about the environment and Christianity. And so I ended up going to seminary at Gordon-Conwell and studied Old Testament and New Testament there, and had some just fantastic teachers and mentors who helped me learn to study scripture, and a good friend and mentor, called Sean McDonough, especially who really emphasized the centrality of the theme of new creation in Scripture and the way in which that embraces the whole of creation.

Jonathan Moo:
And so that helped me begin to make some of the connections that perhaps I hadn't made before between my Christian faith and these other things that I was passionate about. And then I went on to do a Ph.D. in early Judaism and the New Testament in the University of Cambridge. And the focus of that was actually trying to understand how ancient Judaism and the New Testament understands the created worlds and the natural world, what role does that play, and I was working in apocalyptic texts, which are often thought of any book in the New Testament, for example, or just an early literature to be the books that kind of give up hope for this world.

Jonathan Moo:
But I found just the reverse. The reason I was drawn to these texts in the first place was partly because their literary style, their kind of imaginative worlds they create, but also because they had so much to say about nature. And so even if sometimes it's an uproar, an upheaval, they're very interested in the created world. You even get a sort of bizarre pseudoscience in some of the Jewish apocalyptic texts that are kind of the see-er is being taken on a tour of heaven and earth and is looking at all parts of the created world. And what you discern there is a real interest in it. And actually a sense often that where the world of humanity is so often disordered and fails to honor God as creator, the created world goes on being what it was created to be, bringing glory to God. It's of course a prophetic theme. You have it in Isaiah and elsewhere, but then it shows up in these apocalyptic texts again. And so it was kind of a fascinating entry into thinking about what my later focus has been, which is sort of a biblical theology of creation, by focusing on these texts.

Jonathan Moo:
While I was in Cambridge, I had this rather extraordinary opportunity, and I think it was my second year just with my Ph.D., the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, which was founded in Cambridge, not shortly before that time, was looking for someone to do research, and research in ecology and scripture and Christianity. And I can still remember the conversation I had with my wife, who was working at a church at the time in Cambridge. And she had phoned me and said she'd heard about this from our Vicar that this institute was looking for that, and I, in my usual trusting way, said, "Well, there's no way they're going to be interested in someone who really takes scripture seriously." Because usually science and religion discussions are done in the philosophical or theological level. And she said, "No, they actually want someone who's doing that." And I said, "They're probably not going to be interested in someone who has such a high view of Scripture as I do either. They're going to want someone who's perhaps seen as more liberal or something." She said, "No, they actually really would love to have someone who's deeply rooted in orthodox Christianity."

Jonathan Moo:
And I said, "Of course, I'm in the middle of my Ph.D., there's no way they're going to hire me." She said, "We should at least try." And so I did. And in the end, by God's grace, I got hired on long before I finished my Ph.D. actually, to begin a research post with the Faraday Institute. That became a full time thing for a number of years after my Ph.D., alongside doing some teaching there. And there, many of the questions that I had as an undergraduate and especially in that crisis of faith I had gone through, I was able to put two Nobel Prize winning scientists, because this was a place in Cambridge that attracted many of the best scientists who had a faith of their own, and who thought about how do they connect this to their Christian faith.

Jonathan Moo:
And so it's just a delightful and productive and fruitful time for me of doing this kind of deep textual study in Jewish apocalypses and Romans, the book of Revelation, talking to scientists and philosophers of religion and theologians about how we put faith and science together, while working on this project with my colleague, Bob White, who was a geophysicist in the University of Cambridge, thinking about Christianity and ecology and the environment. And so I sometimes tell my students this story, because all the way through my life, it just felt like going one direction, banging up against the wall and going some other direction, not really sure what's going to happen. But in retrospect, you can see how God often weaves things together in ways that you could never have anticipated and that have just been so rich.

Jonathan Moo:
And so then at the end of those years, Whitworth University, where I am now, was looking for a biblical scholar and is a place like, I guess, a number of perhaps Christian liberal arts universities, is really committed to thinking about how we connect Christian faith to the whole of life. And so they were interested in the fact that I was trying to combine biblical scholarship with science and ecology, and has provided me just an incredible context in which to do that with a wide diversity of students, with colleagues from across the disciplines here.

Jonathan Moo:
We're engaged in a number of projects together, and it's just such a rich and enlivening place to do this kind of thing. But you're right that it's somewhat rare to get to do this, to be in a theology department, doing biblical studies, but then also spending a lot of time with my biology and political science colleagues thinking more broadly about environmental issues, but it's just a great joy for me.

Kymberli Cook:
That's fantastic. What a fascinating story. That's really, yeah, that's interesting. I think it's interesting that you said you kind of just grew up outdoors and loving the outdoors and that kind of thing. And that's part, at least obviously, there's much more to your story. But that's part of where this love for creation and contemplation of creation and its role in God's plan and in His kingdom. And I think that's so interesting, because I share something similar in that I was raised in a home that I tell my four year old now, when I was four years old, I was hiking mountains, and they were, carry my backpack at times, and then other times I get a little, you need to suck it up talk, and I just keep hiking.

Kymberli Cook:
And so, to his credit, my grandfather was really the one that fostered that in our whole family, and very much the you pack out all of your trash, and you leave everything cleaner, or exactly like you found it, and we have to be careful with the earth. And I mean, he was this salty outdoorsman who fought in World War II. There's nothing remotely, sometimes that these kinds of conversations can get labeled liberal, or that kind of thing. There's nothing remotely liberal or anything about him, West Coast, anything about him. He's a Kansan, and he just instilled in us this deep care for creation and concern for its health, and a recognition that if it's not healthy, we're not healthy, and we have this responsibility. And so I just love the work that you do. And we're so thrilled again to have you here, and what an interesting story how you kind of got to where you are. Clearly the Lord was with you, and it continues to be.

Kymberli Cook:
But so you actually have a book called, "Creation Care." And you've talked about that even when you were telling your story. So what do we mean when we talk about caring for creation? Is that just another way of saying environmentalism, for those people who might be a little bit more suspicious of this conversation? What are we talking about when we are talking about creation care?

Jonathan Moo:
That's a good question. Yeah. And I think you can actually call it different things. Lauren Wilkinson called it, "earth keeping," which isn't a bad way to describe it either. I actually don't like the word environment though. As it turns out, and my one of my best friends here on campus, he's a biologist, and we both, along with a couple others helped run our environmental studies program and our environmental science program, but he doesn't like the word. He refuses to be called an environmentalist. And there's different reasons for that. Some of it might be the political connotation that sometimes has for him at least.

Jonathan Moo:
But for me, the biggest problem is it suggests that there's us and then there's everything outside of us, that is the environment. And it fails to capture the biblical picture of the reality that we are creatures among other creatures, that we belong to creation. On the God-creation dualism, which is actually a dualism, we stand on the creature side of that, a part of the rest of the created world. And by naming it a creation, we're also saying something really important: we're saying that this isn't simply happenstance that we are here, that the world exists. But rather, this is the free act of God to create something other than God, to create a creation. And so I think that's why I like "creation care" as a term is because it reminds us what the nature of what it is that we might care about and care for. This is God's creation, it belongs to God, it doesn't belong to us. And it's not simply the environment outside of us. And perhaps, we'll go on to talk about this later. But it's one of the reasons I dislike trying to hold up our care for our sisters and brothers, our fellow human beings, against our care for the rest of the created world.

Jonathan Moo:
I think too often, that is used to justify a lack of imagination and a lack of living into our calling, to be carers for God's creation. Of course, that's the other part of that term that creation care is that I think, my father and I wrote this book together. And I think he says on the one hand, we just want to care about creation, like why should we care about it at all? And obviously, in certain versions of the Christian faith that some of us have inherited, there can be a kind of neglect to care about the created world, like it's a distraction from caring for people, from proclaiming the gospel, from doing all those things that we are called to do. So why should we care about creation at all? That's something we'll need to perhaps talk about a bit.

Jonathan Moo:
But ultimately, one of the reasons we should care about creation is that I believe God entrusts us with responsibility for its care, and that care is probably the best way to capture the complex of ways that Scripture describes human being's relationship with the rest of the created world, which ranges from rule over creation, or over actually other creatures, if we're going to be precise in Genesis 1, to working and keeping the ground where Adam and Eve are placed in Genesis chapter 2, to the way that that rule over creation over other creatures is unpacked for us then in the rest of Scripture. And that takes us right to the other end of the Bible to Revelation, where the promise for those who are redeemed by the blood of the lamb is that they will reign on Earth, that that rule is restored, our role as priests and rulers of creation is given back to us in Christ.

Jonathan Moo:
So creation care, I think, at least is an attempt to capture all of that, and to say something rather a lot more than even caring for the environment or environmentalism or something. And then hopefully, it's perhaps not as hostage either, like you alluded to particular political ideologies. I'm very happy to call myself an environmentalist in the right context, and I can explain what that means. But I far prefer the term creation care.

Kymberli Cook:
That's interesting. I believe it's Ian McFarland who talks about, he really kind of hammers away at the idea, it's similar to what you were saying about this hierarchy that we seem to have in our mind about God's creation. And he says, "No, no, we're all called out ones. We have all been called out of nothingness by God." And not to say that it's all the same and that kind of thing, but to your point, this idea that no, we are responsible, and we are among God's creation, and we have to remember that. So you did talk about caring about creation. And so let's talk first about caring about creation. And then we can talk about caring for creation, or if it just weaves in and out of each other, then we can do that, too. So why should we care about creation? You said essentially stewardship of the role and responsibilities that God has given us. That's one thing that you just mentioned. How else do you communicate to those around you why we should care?

Jonathan Moo:
I think the first reason and the most important one is it's an expression of our love for God, because God cares about creation. This runs right through the whole of Scripture. And that's what I was suggesting earlier about the way in which my immersion in reading scripture that came in seminary broadened my view of what the gospel is all about and scripture is all about. That includes all things. And that goes right from Genesis to Revelation. So in Genesis, we learn, one of the most important things we learn in Genesis chapter one, and one of the great sadnesses of science and religion conflict as it's sometimes portrayed to us and the debate about evolution and Christian faith is it distracts us from the very clear things that we all can agree are taught to us in the early chapters of Genesis.

Jonathan Moo:
They're actually the purposes of the text, whatever else we might say about evolution, for example, and what do we learn? Well, seven times, we're told that the world is good. And at the completion of all the things that are made, it is very good. It's not just good with us showing up on the scene. But the rest of creation, God sees and names as good in and of itself. And it's actually interesting to me that right there, that first chapter of Genesis, we get a distinctive Christian contribution to contemporary environmental ethics. So I teach environmental ethics here, among other things, and we spend, sometimes a ridiculous amount of time debating about do other creatures, does the rest of creation have intrinsic worth, worth in of itself?

Jonathan Moo:
Well, it turns out Christians actually have an answer to that question. And we actually may not want to call it intrinsic, but it has worth that is given to other creatures apart from ourselves, because other creatures relate to God. And God sees them and sees them as good. God sees God's whole creation and sees it as good. And so right there, we suddenly have a reason to care about it, because God cares about it.

Jonathan Moo:
We see in the Psalms, the way all of non human creation worships and praises and glorifies God. You get this wonderful conclusion, like a Psalm 148, where then at the very end, we turn up and we become members of this cosmic choir that's offering praise to God by taking up our appropriate place within creation and glorifying God like the rest of the world does just by being itself. And that interest in creation, which of course is so prominent in the prophets, in which creation and human beings, God's people Israel are linked together in this cosmic covenant, that doesn't go away in the New Testament. We can go simply to Jesus and to see the Jesus. Who is Jesus first of all? He is God who has taken on flesh, God incarnate.

Jonathan Moo:
I sometimes think I could just start there, and perhaps it's actually a better place to start to develop a Christian doctrine of creation, because there's no more radical affirmation of the goodness of this material world in that God's self should take upon the material stuff of this creation. Again, it doesn't weigh with any sort of a demeaning or diminishment of material existence as bad or as evil. It shows us that this created world can actually be a vehicle for displaying the divine. And there's a lot to be said there. I mean, if we take seriously Jesus' incarnation as something that binds himself not just to human beings, but to all creatures, to all flesh, I think sometimes this perhaps sounds heretical or something, but it's not at all. I think it's actually deeply biblical. Much of Jesus' genetic material would have been made up of gut bacteria, as is for every human being. Jesus is truly a full human being; he shares what it is to be a human being. And so he's bound God's self, to the whole of the created world.

Jonathan Moo:
And because of that, the New Testament writers unpack the significance of Jesus' death and resurrection as something that extends to the whole of the created world. Now, we'll have to come back and talk about the distinctiveness of human beings in the story, who stand at the center of the need of redemption, and the rest of creation's fate tied to us. But for the time being, just notice that those texts that describe what God accomplishes in the cross and resurrection and the new creation that is assured by that, it is the reconciliation of all things, of all of creation, a new heavens and a new earth, where everything is made new. Not all new things are made, the rest of it thrown out. Rather, this world is made new, is restored to glorify God, which is what we'd expect if God actually comes in the incarnation to go to death on a cross, and then raises in physical resurrection, to reign over it in Jesus Christ.

Jonathan Moo:
It's what we would expect of the story. So God's purposes have encompassed the whole of creation, from the beginning to the very end. And so that would give us reason to care about it, because God cares about it. And the second reason, and perhaps we can come to this, of course, is we recognize, especially today that we cannot love our neighbor. We think about Jesus' summary of the law and the prophets to love God and love neighbor. If we don't care for the creative world, of which they and of which we are also a part, we are bound to the rest of creation, and that's part of the goodness of created life.

Kymberli Cook:
So we should care about and for creation because we love God, and we're supposed to love God, and we're supposed to love others, like you said, and part of loving God is respecting what He has Himself cared about, and asked us to care for. So in obedience as well as you mentioned, how creation glorifies him. And if we are allowing an unhealthy creation and/or even fostering unhealthy creation, then we are not only disregarding what God has given us and our responsibilities, or what God has created, not even just given us what He has created, and our responsibility to it. But we're also in a way stifling God's glory, because we're stifling creation. And so we don't want to do that as believers either and then obviously, loving one another. So we talked, you did talk through several of the themes in Scripture that you've seen. And so why don't we go back to what you said about coming back to how we should understand man being in the middle of all of that? So go ahead and speak to us about that, especially within what Scripture has to say and how it's related to creation in our approach to creation care.

Jonathan Moo:
I do. I've actually been thinking about this recently again, just because there's been a lot of philosophers writing about how living in what they call the Anthropocene, this age of humanity, where they consider human beings to have become a geological force, and in fact, the dominant geological force in our time. And I have my hesitations about naming this era that but it's just trying to reflect what has become a reality. It has led a lot of people to say we need to rethink what it is to be a human being and our relationship to the natural world.

Jonathan Moo:
And this sounds overly apologetic. And so I want to say in every context, but I sometimes want to raise my hand and say, "The Christian Scriptures got there already." Because what does Scripture tell us? It tells us first of all, something that perhaps the Enlightenment led to many of us to forget that we are one creature among others. We are bound to the rest of creation, even the Genesis creation story. I try to help students recognize when we read the narrative that I think the climate, the high point of this narrative is God's rest on the seventh day, sitting down in throne over all that God has made. But we always want to focus on human beings that do get particular attention. There's a lengthy description of our creation, but we're created on the same day as other land animals. We belong to other land animals. We're created in the same day as they are.

Jonathan Moo:
And you can go to the prophets, you can go to I Peter, you can go to James, for regular reminders that human beings are, on the one hand, deeply insignificant, here today and gone tomorrow, like the flowers in the field, the grass withers and the flowers fall. The Word of the Lord stands forever, but we don't. We're mortal, transient, insignificant human beings. It's no wonder that the psalmist can look up at the immensity of space and say, "What are human beings that you care about them? What could we possibly matter the vast expanse of things?"

Jonathan Moo:
James puts it most dramatically when James says that we are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. And so why do we make all these plans without any reference to God, that tomorrow, I'm going to do this or that and make money for myself. If that's done without reference to God, it's just meaningless, it's empty. And so we don't have to go far in Scripture to see our insignificance and the fact that we are indeed on the creaturely side of the Creator creation divide.

Jonathan Moo:
And yet, of course, Scripture wants to say something more than that. So I think about Psalm 103, where you get one of these texts that reminds us of how insignificant we are, but it's actually framed by God's deep love and concern for us. And I think what I love about that text, I should maybe turn to it to read it precisely. But what I love about this text is that it reminds us that our significance, our value and our worth doesn't come from things that are intrinsic to ourselves, but rather God's decision to enter into a particular relationship with us and to give us a particular responsibility within God's creation. I take it that that's actually what is meant by the image of God in Genesis. And obviously, it's interesting, the image of God language turns up only a handful of times in Scripture. And ultimately, I think we want to go to Christ if we want to know what the image of God looks like. But it has led to endless speculation.

Jonathan Moo:
And often, the speculation begins by looking at ourselves and the world around us and say, "Well, what makes us different?" There's a certain reasonableness to that. This is one of the things that the Anthropocene has taught us. Well, there is something different about human beings today in our ability to impact the rest of the world and our ability to plan and to have purposes that we could even reflect on our purposes. That's something other creatures don't do. So I'm happy to say there are things, perhaps degrees of difference, but maybe even more than that, that make us different from other creatures. But I don't think that's actually what Scripture is so interested in that has set us among other creatures in the community of creation, but it has said that we indeed, perhaps partly because of those abilities, have a distinctive way of relating to God.

Jonathan Moo:
We are relational creatures created male and female. It's the only time in the Genesis 1 narrative where God also says, "Let us create human beings in the image of God." And Christians have, from early times, seen there is a hidden pointer to God's existence in three persons already: God in perfect relationship of love in God's self that now calls us into particular relationship with God as relational beings, who will relate to God in a distinctive way.

Jonathan Moo:
Other creatures, as I've already suggested, glorify, worship God by being themselves, fulfilling the ends that they were created to fulfill. We are given a particular responsibility in creation to rule over other creatures, and the ability to respond to God in obedience or not, as we learned in the narrative that follows in the Garden of Eden. Do we take from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Or do we look to God for our identity and for our source of what is good and for what life is? And of course, the tragic story is us turning away from that and reaping death and brokenness and distance as a result, but that makes us distinctive, that we relate to God in a particular way and we have this particular responsibility of care for other creatures, such that by the time we get to the prophets and to the Apostle Paul, in Romans 8, for example, the fate of the whole of creation is bound up to us.

Jonathan Moo:
So I mentioned Psalm 8 earlier, the psalmist looks up at the expanse of heavens and can't imagine how we matter at all and sometimes with our abilities today, with physics and our study of the cosmos and our sense of the size of the universe, we can be very struck by our insignificance. And I think that's right and that's healthy and that's good, actually. But I don't think it's necessarily any different than a Middle Eastern shepherd setting out on a rock, looking up at an endless starry sky, a sky with more stars than we will ever see, looking up from our earth today would feel: that vulnerability, that fragility, that sense of what can I possibly matter? It's an ancient question. It's what we ask again today, but it's no different than that one. And of course, the answer that the psalmist gets is that human beings matter profoundly. Why? Because God has put all creatures under the dominion of the Son of Man, human beings.

Jonathan Moo:
The psalmist is just echoing the Genesis creation story here. And I think for the psalmist, I mean, this has to be just a, it's an article of faith as much as anything else. In what sense, for example, are those things that swim through the pads of the sea, under the dominion of the shepherd in the Middle Eastern desert? It wouldn't seem that way except that God has said that that is the case, that other creatures' fate is bound up with God's people. So in the life of Israel, the land is included in their covenant with God in response to their faithfulness to God or not.

Jonathan Moo:
And Paul then picks up that theme in the New Testament, and sees that the whole groaning creation, what is it waiting for? It is waiting for the revelation of the children of God, for us to become the people who were created to be, that awaits finally the resurrection and new creation to come. But which one would expect creation receives glimpses off even in the presence. God's people live as the children of God, as restored in relationship to creation.

Jonathan Moo:
So human beings come to play this extravagant role in the created world, because of God's choice to link the fate of non-human creation to us. Therefore, we think about the cross and the resurrection. Who does Jesus come to save? It is broken sinners, human beings, you and me, who stand exiled from God and in need of reconciliation with God, our sins to be forgiven, for us to be given new life and in union with Christ to be made who we are created to be.

Jonathan Moo:
And when that happens, when what Christ did in the cross is accomplished, it enables all of creation then to participate in that reconciliation of all things that are brought about through what Christ has done in Christ's atonement. So I think Christians have a, of course, it's a message that is not going to be heard in a secular context, exactly. But for our own approach to creation care to so called environmental issues, it's actually helpful to realize that we have some really important things to say about what it is to be human, that actually quite shockingly make a lot of sense of our world today to where we see we are fully dependent upon creation affected by it, not able to, as much as we try to pretend we're not bound to it or live that way because our technologies and our media can enable us to think that, we still are bound up with the world and affected by the world, connected to it, and yet have a unique ability to affect the whole world from other creatures, even to the atmosphere itself.

Kymberli Cook:
So in your discussion about your interpretation of creation, and Christian care within Scripture, I mean it's fantastic. But I have to imagine that there are a variety of other approaches people have taken in trying to think through what we do with creation, and what we see in Scripture. Are there some interpretations or approaches that you've found particularly problematic in how people look at scripture, in light of this topic?

Jonathan Moo:
Yeah, of course, probably the things that one finds most problematic are the ones that are nearest to one's own context. And so having grown up in North America, and in evangelical contexts where I was taught such important and good and true things about God and Christ and what the gospel involves, there were things that were left out that just reflect a variety of things that happened hundreds of years ago, perhaps that we've inherited. And what I think was often left out was any attentiveness to the way in which creation is bound up in the story from first to last.

Jonathan Moo:
And what's sad to me is that lack of attentiveness has certain theological justifications and we can look at some biblical texts that perhaps can seem to support some of that, but have often led in a sense to, Wendell Berry at one point calls this sort of the chief of worldly conveniences. When you're living by the tides of the world's most destructive, I think he used the word economy here, but we just say destructive practices, when you're kind of bound up with them and benefit from them in all sorts of hidden and less hidden ways, it's easy to just go along with the status quo, with the culture around you, if you've decided that, well, Christianity is not really about the created world. It's only about this existential relationship that I have with God and maybe with my interactions with others.

Jonathan Moo:
Therefore, I can go on and accumulate wealth and not care too much about injustice or how I'm treating the earth because it just doesn't matter to God. So it justifies actually those who would, for selfish ends, ultimately destroy the earth upon which we depend. It justifies that and enables our participation in that.

Jonathan Moo:
And of course, one of the things that I often encounter, I suppose, at times in churches is the notion that well, creation really doesn't have a future. That well, it's all going to be burned up ultimately. And therefore, it's not something we should be concerned about. And this is justified by passages like 2 Peter 3, for example, that describes the radical rupture, that there must be if God's kingdom is to come to earth, and if sin and evil is to be finally done away with. And that's a radical rupture. It's actually the challenge to the audience in 2 Peter, who are living lives, much like the lives perhaps of our culture of hedonism. 2 Peter describes them as those who kind of go to the gym, so they can become really good at greed. So it's like they're training in greed, and he uses the word for athletic training.

Jonathan Moo:
But I sometimes feel like that's much of what our culture would have us do, like what do we need to accumulate lots of things for ourselves? And in 2 Peter, Peter says, "Because they're saying things go on as they always have, God may have created the world, may have saved us in Christ, but remains now distant and uninvolved, and there is no final judgment to be awaited. There is nothing that's going to change in the future." And against that, 2 Peter wants to emphasize as strongly as possible the radical rupture between this world as it is not constituted and the new creation to come and describes that as the fire of God's judgment, which the day of the Lord comes with burning of the heavens and the elements and the earth and all that's on it, is then found before God. And that burning up of all of these things is sometimes taken to mean therefore the kind of rubbishing of the whole of creation.

Jonathan Moo:
And before I even address that text, which I think maybe I should, since I brought it up now.

Kymberli Cook:
That was my next question. What do you say to people who say it's going to be destroyed anyway? You're taking the path I was wanting to walk down anyway.

Jonathan Moo:
And I think one thing I want to say before I even say what I think is happening in this text is, let's say that the New Testament taught that this world was going to be rubbished and thrown out at the end. I don't think at all that that's what what it teaches. I'm convinced it doesn't, in fact, but if it did, we still would have the command from the very beginning to care for other creatures, to love God and what God cares for and to love our neighbors and our neighbors' lives are, and this perhaps requires some scientific justification but I don't think it takes a whole lot of work, are bound up with healthfulness and the flourishing of the whole of creation, and so-

Kymberli Cook:
The COVID crisis clearly demonstrates that.

Jonathan Moo:
Precisely. Yeah, I'm glad you made that link. I've been surprised that link has not perhaps been made more often, actually, that this is an example of the fact that we are bound up with other creatures. And what scientists have been telling us for a very long time about our treatment of particular habitats and interactions with them lead to an epidemic and a pandemic such as this. And so it just should drive that home for us, of that need to care well now.

Jonathan Moo:
So I would want to say, first of all, that I could very happily sit with a sister or brother who thinks the world's going to be burned up and destroyed. But perhaps we might end up with the same ethic of creation care. I would hope we would if we actually attended to the rest of that. But nonetheless, that would be very strange, given what Scripture says about God's delight in the created world, from the start to the end.

Jonathan Moo:
Why, for example, in Revelation is the whole of the created world constantly bursting into praise for what God is doing? Even as it's being dismantled or fighting back against the evil that has come on to it, unless it sees that its future is bound up with what God is doing. That it participates in the life of the new heavens and new earth, the new creation to come. So it would be odd if that was the case.

Jonathan Moo:
But I don't think that that is the case. 2 Peter, which is I think probably the one text that has been taken that way and understandably sometimes has been taken that way, it's partly related to what I think is there's a confusion in the Greek manuscripts. We have amazingly a diversity of manuscripts for the New Testament, which agree in extraordinary amounts of ways. I always tell my Greek students, we really could just at random take any set of manuscripts for the New Testament, and our faith would not look any different. So even as we do the important and difficult work of text criticism, where there are differences all over the place, we ought to put that in context and recognize those places where it might actually matter is where English translators usually give us a footnote, and they tell us here, there is a manuscript difference, and it might actually matter, so you should know about it.

Jonathan Moo:
But we can be assured about the reliability of the New Testament and what it teaches us. But here, 2 Peter 3 might be one of the places where it's perhaps the most significant possible difference, in that some of the texts have a variety of ways of saying, at the end of that passage, that the earth in the works that are done on it, a variety way of saying it will be destroyed, or will be burned up. That diversity of readings itself is probably a signal to us that something's happened here. There has been a confusion at some point to the manuscript tradition.

Jonathan Moo:
But one of the earliest and best attested readings, well one of the most reliable readings we have actually, which is what I think reflected in many of our English translations now, says the earth and the works done on will be found before God. And that can seem weird, like if the heavens are burning and the elements are being destroyed, what does it mean for the earth to be found before God? But I think we actually have a clue in this picture in the prophets where, often we try to hide from God. I mean, we go back to the Garden of Eden for that. But in Isaiah, you have people trying to hide under the rocks, because we don't want our sin and evil to be exposed by the fire of God's judgment, to be seen by God.

Jonathan Moo:
And yet, what Scripture says is that God's word pierces through that and reveals truth for what it is. And I think Peter is picking up just that theme, that the fire of God's judgment takes away the heavens, and the elements here might actually refer to the heavenly beings, which is what the term, "stoicheia" ["elements" in 2 Peter 3:12], was often used for. By the second century, at least, we don't know for sure in the first century, that this was burned up, and then the earth is found before God, there's nowhere to hide.

Jonathan Moo:
And it's much like in 1 Peter, where it talks about the fire that burns silver and gold, refining it. 1 Peter uses the same word there, so that our works may be found to result in praise and honor and glory to God. And so you have that same kind of a parallel there in 1 Peter, and then 2 Peter itself, right after this passage about the burning up, or in the same passage about the buring up of the elements in the heavens, says, "Therefore, seek to be found by Him at peace," "eirene" ["peace" in 2 Peter 3:14], "shalom,'" in that wholeness of life that God intends.

Jonathan Moo:
And so I think what we're being told here is that we and the whole of the earth is going to be found before God, and there's a radical rupture. Right? We don't want to miss it. That's the whole point of 2 Peter, there's a radical rupture. But that radical rupture is not inconsistent with what is taught so much more clearly elsewhere in the New Testament about the future of this earth, of this creation, however radically transformed. And so that's where I would want to say: 2 Peter himself, sends us back to Romans, or not to Romans but to Paul, he says, "Pay attention to what Paul says, I know some of it's hard, but stick with it."

Jonathan Moo:
We go back to Paul in Romans. And here we have a text where even the reformers have always said we should let Scripture interpret Scripture and clear text interpret more difficult text. Well, Romans 8 is a text where this groaning creation, that now groans, longs for its liberation at the revealing of the children of God. I don't see how you can read that text and not see that, in some form, this created world is liberated, is freed at the time of the resurrection, at the redemption of our bodies, and brought into the freedom of the glory, the children of God. This whole world is caught up in God's purposes from start to finish. And so, though it is not necessary for care for creation, it confirms the fact that this world matters in God's sight from start to finish, and that God's purposes are all encompassing, and don't leave anything out.

Kymberli Cook:
So what does it actually look like for us to care for creation and ease the groaning of creation or at least not contribute to creation's groaning? What does it really look like for us as believers as well as just I mean human beings but I think particularly for us as believers with all of this theology and biblical narrative behind us, what does that look like?

Jonathan Moo:
One of the things that, especially as we start with a groaning of creation, it probably means being attentive to that in the first instance. And in our time right now that's going to meet lament. I mean, many of us I know in my church and perhaps in yours and others, we have at various times during COVID crisis spent time in lament over all that's happening. And that's an appropriate response to a groaning creation and to suffering sisters and brothers throughout creation. In the book, you mentioned Creation Care where we have some attentiveness to that, how does this actually play itself out?

Jonathan Moo:
I use this acronym, "AWAKE," to try to summarize the different ways in which we might respond and live out what God calls us to. In the first instance, it's being "Attentive" to this good world that God created. And I really would want to see it not as, too often in our culture, we have and I do this plenty of times, throwing all these data about how severe the challenges are that we're facing, and then put all this kind of guilt and blame and shame upon ourselves and say, now we need to change something.

Jonathan Moo:
I think that really, what we first of all need to do is to see the gospel as an invitation to see the world as it truly is, and to participate in the worship that creation gives to God and to be attentive to the beauty and goodness of this world. That however much it is groaning, it still reveals the glory of God, still is a beautiful and wondrous place, to be out of that place of love and joy, that our care for creation ultimately comes.

Jonathan Moo:
So that's the first thing I think, is just actually being willing to be attentive. And that means, in a very basic way, just in our places, being attentive to what is around us, giving ourselves the permission to see the world afresh and to glorify God through it. I love what the novelist Evelyn Waugh says about Christian conversion, that it's about stepping across the threshold from, I forget what he says the world is right now, but it's kind of where we don't see things right, but into the real world that God made, and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.

Jonathan Moo:
And I love that picture of limitless exploration of God's good world. And that's given to us in Scripture. We're given a lens by which to see the world aright and to embrace it and its goodness to join in its groaning, and to attend to its challenges as well. So attentiveness also, then of course, does lead to that lament. Because if we're truly attentive to our own local places, but also to our sisters and brothers around the world, and to the groaning of creation that is so evident in our day, we are necessarily going to lament and need to be attentive to what's happening.

Jonathan Moo:
I'm always so frustrated by the lack of attention sometimes in the media, except for kind of dramatic overplayed stories often, to just the everyday functioning of the world that we depend upon from day to day. I wish we had an equivalent to a sports page. We had a page devoted to the earth this week. And some papers have a little section like that, but just to be attentive to the world around us or just to our local place.

Jonathan Moo:
So that's the first thing. And I'll carry on with the silly acronym, since I used it in the book. The "W" for "AWAKE" is "Walking." And of course, what I mean by that is just thinking about how we engage with the world around us in our transportation. And we haven't talked about the science of climate change or anything else like that. But I think, obviously one of the ways we can just live lives of personal virtue that reflect God's purposes for us is by thinking about where we live, how we construct our houses, and how we get around. And walking for me has been such a part of my life that I've tried to build into it as much as I can, wherever I live. That enables me to be more neighborly, connected to my neighbors and to my place and attentive to it, as well as perhaps being good for the climate, just not that it's making a difference by one act, but living a life that is consistent with what I claim to be about. So thinking about transportation and all of its ways.

Jonathan Moo:
The next "A" is for "Activism." And I'm increasingly aware of how necessary this is and how much of an activist I am not. But activism doesn't have to be being out in the street with a placard, or in a strike, although it may well require that of us at times, as it often has for Christians throughout history. I think about Christians addressing the slave trade and their boycotting of sugar and their willingness to speak out and to be very bold, and actually adopt quite profound sacrifices in their way of life for something that. For example, for someone in England, it may seem very distanced from the slave trade, and yet they were bound to it to the products they consumed.

Jonathan Moo:
There's an analogy there with our contemporary challenges to the flourishing of life on Earth. But I think activism often should begin in the church for those who are Christians. Just encourage your pastor, or if you're a pastor yourself, to attend to this theme in Scripture that we often just miss, to preach on it, to teach on it. And to then let, I think the pastor's first role is to proclaim the Word of God and to administer the sacraments. But when we proclaim the Word of God, we need to be attentive to what Scripture says and how it hits our own context. And so we need to be making sure we're doing that in a way that's going to encourage those in our parishes to go out and do all the things they're called to do in all of their different fields in a way that honors God's purposes for the created world. Sometimes maybe there'll be full time work. Other times, just seeing how their own field, their own insight, can contribute to that.

Jonathan Moo:
So activism I think is necessary for us because the challenges we face with loss of other species and life and climate change require broad changes. And I would hope that Christians would have much more of a voice there. In a way, we've kind of ceded the solutions to these things to those who often don't identify as followers of Christ, because so many Christians, at least in North America, have neglected even attend to these things. So activism I think is necessary.

Jonathan Moo:
The last two, I'll be very brief, are "Consumerism," rightly spelled wrong, because of course, we critique the culture of consumers. And we all are consumers, and the Eucharist reminds us of that week in, week out. But how do we do that wisely and well?

Jonathan Moo:
And the last letter is "E", which is "Eating," the most basic way in which we are connected to the life of the world around us, and to do that in ways that are in keeping with honoring the life of other creatures and the flourishing of all of life on Earth.

Kymberli Cook:
Fascinating, okay, so just to kind of pull it all together, I'm hearing that creation care is not necessarily environmentalism, that though it's not necessarily distinct, they're definitely in the same conversation. Creation care is a bit more of a holistic term, that it doesn't allow us to be separated from our environment, because it's all working together. And it all, like you've said repeatedly is so interdependent, and we can't get out of it. It is where we are.

Kymberli Cook:
And we should care for creation, above all, because the greatest commandments are to love God and love others. And that is one of the ways that we do it. And the themes for creation care are throughout Scripture, and particularly just the theme of seeing God's love for his creation and concern for it and delight in it throughout and even to the point of coming into it through the incarnation and with the intention of redeeming it. And we believe that it will one day be redeemed, that this whole theme should make our hearts swell with excitement and joy and delight for the creation. And then from that, we work to carry out our responsibilities to care for it, and not just care about it, but care for it. And like you said, you have that great "AWAKE" acronym of different ways that we can do it. So I just want to thank you so much, Jonathan, for your time and for the deep thought that you've put into this. And for even this, this is an active activism book. You're doing great.

Jonathan Moo:
Thank you.

Kymberli Cook:
I really appreciate your time.

Jonathan Moo:
Thank you so much.

Kymberli Cook:
Yeah, and we'd like to thank you who are listening. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and join us next week as we discuss issues of God and culture.