I've just finished reading a quite wonderful book of theology, Elizabeth A. Johnson's Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (Bloomsbury 2014).It was recommended to me at that religion and anthropocene conference in Indiana because the very title is taken from the Book of Job, from chapter 12, where Job appeals to the witness of nature to defend himself against the human-all-too-human wisdom of his friends.
7 “But ask the animals, and they will teach you;
the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
8 ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
9 Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
10 In his hand is the life of every living thing
and the breath of every human being. (NRSV)
In fact, Johnson doesn't spend much time on Job. She let's his question frame her project, and later celebrates the theophany as a strong antidote to the human arrogance that has flowed in the modern era in the view of dominion as domination (269). God describes to Job a "community of creation" of which humans are a part, and which long preceded our arrival ("where were you when...?"). Citing Celia Deane-Drummond and Gustavo Gutierrez, she finds the divine speeches confront Job with the otherness of the cosmos.
This expands Job's horizon to the point where he deeply grasps that God's love does not act according to the rules of retribution which a penal view of history insists upon, but like all true love operates freely in a world of grace that completely enfolds and permeates him, even in pain. With new clarity of vision, his story moves toward healing and peace. (271)
Johnson doesn't loop back to Job's pre-conversion question... or perhaps she's left that to us. First you have to ask the beasts, then listen to what they say. Or maybe the voice of nature, which Job apparently knows and appeals to long before God spoke to him on the subject, needs theological amplification.
Not a problem: the rest of Ask the Beasts provides just such an amplification, a reminder and demonstration of what Christian theology can do. The book begins with a sensitive reading of Darwin's Origin of Species, capped with an update on evolutionary thinking today. As a Catholic it's not a problem for her to accept its picture of the origins and unfolding of life. And Origin is full of wonder too, at the remarkable variety, design and interdependence of life. A compelling retrieval of Aquinas' distinction between God as primary and natural laws as secondary causes allows Johnson to leave science to science, while not foreclosing the spiritual questions she finds even Darwin sensed.
But then things get really interesting. Johnson persuasively argues that the realm of "continuous creation" is the place for dialogue, leaving Genesis and Revelation for later. (When she gets to them she will deftly argue that they, too, are theological extensions of experiences - the Exodus, especially - in the lived present, not accounts of the to us entirely unthinkable before and after.) The processes Darwin helped uncover are compatible with the Nicene understanding of the Holy Spirit as the "giver of life," where this is taken to mean both constant indwelling and "free process" - allowing and empowering evolution to take its course, mixing law and chance. A flurry of natural images for the Spirit - wind, water, fire, birds, and of course sophia - suggest this is not a new but an ancient understanding of the vivificantem, if one which later Christianity lost sight of.
From pneumatology Johnson moves to Christology. A reckoning with the staggering scale of death and extinction, read through all creation's "groaning in labor " (Romans 8:22) and the heartbreaking example of pelicans' "backup chicks"(185-6), discerns that Christ is present to all creation, especially in its pain and death. The world evolution unveils, where death is the condition for new life, is indeed cruciform, and there is no reason to think that the resurrection announced by the "first born of the dead" is reserved only for us late-coming humans. When the word became flesh it was not human exclusively, since human flesh is the genetic kin of all terrestrial life. Humanity is a singularity, but fully part of the creation the Spirit allows to unfold and which is promised final fulfillment by Christ.
Johnson doesn't claim to know how it will all end, any more than we know how it all began. Scientific discoveries are giving ever clearer ideas of each, but don't settle the religious question of what "original creation" and new "creation in the eschaton" by the agency known through continuous creation could be. But the Darwin-leavened experience of being part of a vast world continuously fired into being by the Giver of life and of solidarity with the perishing of Christ who shares its flesh allows hope that all are destined for resurrection (235).
I'm not sure my faith can soar so high. But I am encouraged by something Johnson draws from the assertion in the Creation Psalms (especially 104, 148, 96) that all creation praises God in its very being. At a time when prayer does not come easily to postmodern humans, becoming aware of nature’s praise may actually allow these other creatures to help us pray. … The more we attend to them, the more they can lift our hearts to God, borne on their praise. (278)
It may be that this is the story of Job's ecological conversion after all. In the weirdness of the theophany's animals, in their untamable majesty, their power and skill even in killing other animals (all that business about feeding the young lions, etc.) Job may have felt the Spirit's fire, and even Christ's redeeming tears. Wow!
