One of my students who has an interest in the early church thought he had run across an indication that there were times when the early church fathers preached/lectured on the days of creation during Holy Week. Now whether or not they did so, I don’t know for sure. But as I reflected on the idea, it suggested some intriguing connections. It provides a way of pulling together the original creation and the new creation as it focuses on the central role of God’s human creatures in both instances.

Consider this: on the 6th day of the week, God created his human creatures; on the 6th day of the week, Jesus (the Creator incarnate) dies for his human creatures. God’s human creatures were not content to remain creatures. They wanted to rise above and transcend their creatureliness. They wanted to be like God. Yet in that very moment, when they overreached, they fell. And when they fell, they dragged down with them the entire creation into violence, death, and decay. And then we come to Holy Week. The sixth day, the day on which the God had made his human creatures, now becomes the day that the Son (through whom all things were made) now suffers and dies as a human creature. Jesus dies and endures God’s judgment upon his human creatures. And creation fell apart: the earth quaked, the sky darkened.

The parallels continue. In Genesis, after God finished creating, He rested on the seventh day and delighted in all that he had made. And now on the seventh day, after Jesus declared on the cross that “it was finished,” Jesus rested in the tomb. This time he rested not from his work of creation, but from his work of rescuing creation. And then the new beginning. On the first day of the week he arose bodily from the dead. Again, consider the connections. God began his work of creation on the first day. He now ushers in the new creation on the first day of the week—first for humans and then for the rest of creation.  And so Sunday becomes the first day of the new creation or the 8th day of creation—a point illustrated by the shape of many of our baptismal fonts. And so where the fall of the entire creation began, there the restoration of the entire creation begins (namely, with us, God’s human creatures).

Wiki Commons

I remember growing up and watching the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. Between that and reading the adventures of Tom Swift Jr. and His Jetmarine, I became fascinated by adventures related to the exploration of the oceans and the discovery of new creatures and their habitats.

That sense was rekindled this past weekend as James Cameron made a record setting dive down to Challenger Deep, the deepest point of the ocean in the Mariana Trench—nearly seven miles below the surface of the ocean. He did so in a one man submarine of his own design that could also accommodate 3-D cameras for videography. It looks really cool. National Geographic has put together a nice site of the entire expedition. Part of the goal was to search for life, to discover what fish or other creatures might live at such depths and that have never before been seen.

I have often wondered if the commission to care for the creation and to name our fellow creatures (Genesis 1-2) required as a prerequisite, the exploration, discovery, and delight in the wonder of God’s creation. That is, we must first receive it as a gift that testifies of God’s glory and goodness.

Coincidentally with Cameron’s dive, I’ve been reading Jacques Cousteau’s The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World (Bloomsbury, 2007). A Roman Catholic, he has a chapter in the book entitled, “The Holy Scriptures and the Environment.” The book is fascinating as a first hand reflection by Cousteau on his life of exploration. As he described his drive to explore, he made a comment that I like quite a bit, “We never attempted to decipher the meaning of life; we wanted only to testify to the miracle of life” [italics added] (p. 39).

Photo: Alan Murphy

The gulf coast of Texas is quickly becoming one of my favorite places to visit in February. My wife likes the warmer weather, we both like the whooping cranes.

The stretch of coastline from Aransas National Wildlife Refuge to Rockport provides the winter home for the only naturally migrating flock of whooping cranes in the world. Their summer home lies some 2500 miles away in Wood Buffalo National Park located in Northern Alberta. This flock teetered on the brink of extinction in 1941-42. Only 16 birds made it to Aransas that winter. Their numbers have slowly climbed up to nearly 300. The most recent estimate puts that number at approximately 245 cranes.

Last year, many of the cranes were relatively easy to see close up. A boat ride on the Skimmer piloted by Captain Tommy Moore brought one within hundreds of feet of cranes along the edges of the peninsula. This year, we could see them but not as many and not as close up. The cranes are more dispersed largely due to the extreme drought that Texas endured this past year. That means less fresh water from the Guadalupe River basin.

Wolfberries

Less fresh water means higher salinity levels and that means, fewer blue crabs for the cranes—their most important food source during the winter and vital for their trip north and successful breeding season. The cranes have had to expand their range in search of other food such as wolfberries.

The refuge has also been carrying out prescribed burns of thousands of acres in order to clear out underbrush so that the cranes can eat the roasted acorns.

Still it was great to see them again. Many people come in order to check them off on their birder’s “life list.” But there’s more to just seeing them as isolated creatures, as one more species added to our tabulation of the total number of species we’ve personally identified. What makes seeing the whooping cranes in Aransas special is that it provides a chance to see them in their habitat.

Aransas National Wildlife Refuge

As Aldo Leopold noted in his “Marshland Elegy,” cranes and marshes belong together. Each is incomplete without the other. In a similar vein, Wendell Berry also observes how places shape creatures, and more importantly, how each particular place shapes each individual creature (Life is a Miracle, Citizenship Papers). And thousands of years ago, Psalm 104 also observed how God made suitable habitations for each creature and how each creature was uniquely made for life in that habitat. And so in Aransas, they fit one another, the whooping cranes and the gulf coast wetlands.

Great Auk—Wikipedia Commons

The year 2011 saw a number of species go into extinction. These include among others, the western black rhinoceros. Others are in danger as well. On  Friday, Oct 28, 2011 USA Today ran and article entitled, “Extinct in 20 Years?” “Tigers, Lions, Cheetahs, extinct in 20 years? In response to that prospect, the National Geographic launched its “Big Cats Initiative.” And not too long ago, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) updated its red list that provides an assessment of the state of various creatures.

What does extinction mean? In my reading on whooping cranes the last few years, I ran across, the following blunt assessment by Henry Beetle Hough, who in 1933 reflected on the extinction of the Heath Hen in Martha’s Vineyard.  He lamented, “There is no survivor, there is no future, there is no life to be created in this form again. We are looking upon the uttermost finality which can be written, glimpsing the darkness which will not know another ray of light. We are in touch with the reality of extinction.” (J.J. McCoy, The Hunt for Whooping Cranes, viii).

Nothing seems more contradictory than to juxtapose the words creation and extinction. God creates life, abundantly, and lavishly. God is a God of life. In the resurrection of Christ, life triumphs over death. God infuses his breath into his creatures (Psalm 104). Extinction squeezes that breath out that for good. It extinguishes that life, at least for one entire species and all the individual creatures that comprised it. And yet, Christians seem to have come to accept the extinction of other creatures without nary a theological thought.  I myself hadn’t thought much about it either in terms of a worldview until I recently read a fascinating historical account of the history of extinction entitled, Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology, by Mark V. Barrow, Jr. (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Here’s what caught my attention. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it was virtually inconceivable for any thinking person in the west, Christian or not, to conceive the possibility that a species of creatures could go extinct—especially at the hands of humans. Why was it so inconceivable? Their view of the world did not allow for it (a view that was resulted in part from a conflation of platonic and Christian thought). First, there was the providence of God. He created such a plenitude of various creatures that there was no way that humans could over harvest it much less exhaust it. In addition, God created a resilient world. He would not allow that to happen. Second, they operated with a view regarding the perfection of creation that regarded it as intrinsically stable and static. To allow for extinction, would be to allow for imperfection within the world. God created a fixed number at the beginning and it would never become less than that. In addition, people saw everything in the world as linked together by the “great chain of being” from the highest creature down to the lowest creature. Should any of those links be snapped, the entire order of the world would come crashing down. Third, human creatures simply were not powerful enough to disrupt creation and destroy an entire species of creatures.  (Barrow, 18-23)

Consider Thomas Jefferson and the Mastodon. According to to Barrow, Americans had to fend of the charges from Europeans (especially the French scientist Georges Cuvier) that the wet and cool climate of America would give rise to smaller and weaker animals as well as humans. To counter that notion, Jefferson and others engaged in archaeology and produced the fossilized teeth of a mastodon?  Here is a large and magnificent beast! Though none were found on the east coast, that did not mean they were extinct. Surely they lived somewhere on the continent. He apparently told Lewis and Clark to keep their eyes open for them on their voyage of discovery.

The incomprehensibility of extinction changed when naturalists documented that humans had caused a species to go extinct, namely, the dodo bird last seen in 1681 (Barrow, 52) and  the great auk in 1846 (Barrow, 65). Think about the enormous ramifications for one’s view of the world. Some species do go extinct. God does allow species go extinct. And humans can kill off completely an entire species of God’s creatures. This shift in thinking strikes me as nearly as seismic as that of moving from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican understandings of the solar system. And it wasn’t a consequence of Darwinism. This shift occurred prior to Darwin putting forward his theory of evolution. Yet where was the theological reflection on it?

After all, think about it. It affects our the way we view God’s relation to creation, the nature of creation (resilience and fragility), and human ability to alter creation in ways that either enhance God’s work so that all life flourishes or is diminished. In hindsight, it perhaps shouldn’t have been so surprising that humans could push an entire group of creatures into extinction. Two hundred years, later, we are talking about the age of human dominance, the anthropocene. The Christian doctrine of original sin affirms the pervasiveness of human sin and its capacity to engulf creation itself.

The awareness that humans could render an entire species extinct apparently also provide an impetus for conservation. Humans can’t cavalierly take thinking that they cause no harm. They now must take responsibility with this knowledge of their new found power. But ultimately, it will take  the restoration of human creatures to bring about the renewal of creation. The problem began with us and the restoration must begin with us. God’s human creatures need to be transformed in their thinking, attitudes, values, and actions. In the meantime, the Son of God, through whom all things were made, came to restore his entire creation, beginning with his human creatures.