The Beginning and the End. Michael W. Pahl

by God to be the place where God meets with humanity, where God dwells with his human family. It is therefore a reflection of God’s glory, God’s eternal power and divine nature (see Psalm 19:1–4; Isaiah 66:1–2; Romans 1:20), and so to be treasured by humanity, God’s royal representatives on the earth.

      This thought does, then, speak to the modern question of evolution and Christian faith, though perhaps not as directly or extensively as some might like. If we are going to allow Scripture to shape our understanding of God as Creator and the natural world as God’s creation, we cannot have a purely naturalistic approach to the origins of the universe, the earth, and life on earth. That God—the holy and almighty and loving and faithful God—“created the heavens and the earth” means that we must not think of all things coming about through merely arbitrary forces or purely natural processes. Creation proceeds from God—from the will of God, from the heart of God—and thus is radiant with divine significance. While some may wish to say more than this about God’s role in the process and timing of creation, as Christians we certainly cannot say less.

      All this points to another, very practical application of this perspective on the natural world as God’s creation: the importance of what has been called “creation care.” Many Christians are skeptical of environmentalism, some seeing in this a flawed theology that attributes too much significance to nature or even “divinizes” nature. But this criticism is entirely unfounded: no biblical text so clearly differentiates between the transcendent God and the created world as Genesis 1 does, yet no text so clearly emphasizes the “very good”-ness of creation and human responsibility within God’s creation as Genesis 1 does. Caring for creation in “environmentally friendly” or ecologically sensitive ways is not somehow sub-Christian; it is in fact a profoundly Christian thing to do, taking seriously the very purpose for which God created humanity in his image. Christians should be at the forefront of such efforts, not because we share in some flawed theology but because our own Christian theology—our own inspired Scripture—calls us to this task of creation care.