That is where we find God grieving over the consequences of human sin, even to the point of “repenting” of the original creation, and regretting, in particular, the human element within it (Genesis 6:5–7). But Jewish traditions, with a stronger emphasis on the enduring tension between divine promising and human choosing, have directed more attention to the story of the Flood. Most Christian theologians tend to find the first great alienation of creation in “the Fall” – as narrated in Genesis 3. And within the biblical narrative, a number of world-changing events have transpired since the goodness of creation was birthed in its vegetarian utopian conditions (Genesis 1:29–30). The sublime in nature can speak for itself. Is this because of what we read in Genesis 1? No, that is not the reason. Yet we continue to affirm God’s pleasure in the created order, and our own wonder. So COVID-19 has its predecessors, and we are certainly not the first generation to encounter global suffering of this kind. Our attention has been turned in recent months to the so-called Spanish flu (the first known case of which appeared in Kansas in March 1918) that apparently infected nearly a third of the world’s population by 1920, causing an estimated twenty million deaths. However we read such a text (like Genesis 1:2), it serves to remind us of the precariousness of God’s good creation. So read, we might think of creation as God’s protest against chaos - against the “churning, complicating” and “interstitial darkness” that “refuses to disappear” and which ceaselessly threatens to undo God’s “good” work by dragging creation back into the discord against which it was formed. Something like the threat of “natural evil,” however, appears to precede creation even in the narrative of Genesis 1: “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” Here we are reminded that creation may not be creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), as many theologians argue, but rather creatio ex profundis (creation out of the deep waters, creation as the germinating abyss). Following the devastating All Saints Day earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, Voltaire wrote Candide, which famously framed a satirical critique of the philosophical idea - earlier proposed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his Theodicy from 1710 -that God had created the best of all possible worlds. Typically, this means discussions about such things as volcanoes, cancers, tsunamis and plagues. Climate change and the loss of biological diversity have been attributed mainly to human agency and hubris.īeyond the sphere of human evil, we encounter the enduring problem of so-called “natural evil,” which has provoked agonised theological reflection in many generations before us. This beautiful beginning has been repeatedly emphasised by ecological theologians lamenting the obvious signs of distress in the life of our planet. Creation is said to be “good” no less than six times in Genesis 1, before the narrative rounds off with “very good” (Genesis 1:31). The opening chapter of the Bible repeatedly affirms God’s pleasure in the created order. Especially when faith has been built on the conviction that God always, or usually, intervenes on behalf of the faithful, some questions are simply too pressing to ignore. One might be left with the impression that the church has nothing to say about some of the most pressing questions that many people continue to dare to ask. But what kind of faith is this exactly? On the other hand, some pastoral leaders have become all too aware of the immediate challenges, and have left the theological questions to one side. Current circumstances also invite - even demand - deeper reflection on some of the Christian faith’s most basic speech about the relationship between creation and Creator.Ī few churches in the United States have attracted new notoriety by meeting together against the advice of public health officials, even presenting such dissidence as a mark of true faith. Alongside the very many responses elicited by the coronavirus pandemic, there have emerged some profound questions for faith: what might it mean to speak in this context of a loving God who has created the world and who continues in relationship with all creatures, human and non-human, through the depths of suffering, uncertainty, exploitation and death? One set of answers might be found in the renewing of pastoral care, and in reviving the ancient practices of lament.
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