Evolution and the God of Love
Greg Hills
I finished Elizabeth Johnson’s Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love while on holidays last week. The book asks a question that, as Johnson notes, is still making its way into the consciousness of theologians: “What is the theological meaning of the natural world of life?” To address this question, Johnson brings two texts into seemingly unlikely conversation – Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and “the Christian story of the ineffable God of mercy and love recounted in the Nicene creed”….
Johnson focuses on the relational and communal dimensions of evolutionary life as Darwin describes it:
Evolution is a relational process. The sound of mutual relationship is so pervasively present in (The Origin of Species) one might easily miss it. The beat goes steadily on, until the book closes with its vision of the entangled bank, its elaborate form of plants, birds, insects, and worms ‘so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner’. Darwin’s view of life is bent on community. The struggle for life is contextual, each species taking from and benefiting others. There would be no evolution without species constantly interrelating with each other in their particular environment.
Sound trinitarian? It should. And, in fact, Johnson demonstrates that The Origin of Species, far from compromising Christian theology, is a valuable conversation partner. In the last six chapters of Ask the Beasts Johnson draws the Nicene Creed’s image of a trinitarian God of love into the mix, a God who gives life to creation through the Holy Spirit and who chooses to become part of the story of life in Jesus Christ. What emerges is a beautiful account of the freedom and independence of the created life and of God’s loving interaction with it: “The ineffable holy mystery of Love creates, indwells, and empowers plants and animals, delights in their beautiful, wise, and funny ways and grieves their sufferings”. However, the story of evolution is also one marked by tremendous suffering and extinction, and Johnson tackles the question of how such suffering correlates with the Christian vision of a God of love. She is quick to emphasize that she doesn’t want to engage in an exercise in theodicy, but rather wants to attend “to the cost of the origin of species in view of the cross” in order that our sense of the mystery of God’s involvement with the world might deepen. Her account of the suffering that is the necessary concomitant of evolutionary freedom in light of the death and resurrection of Christ – that is, in light of the witness of a God who enters into the suffering of the created order and gives hope through the resurrection – is compelling.
Her account of human destruction of creation in chapters 9 and 10 is also compelling, and more than a little convicting. She challenges the paradigms of ‘dominion’ and ‘stewardship’ that dominate theological interpretations of human relatedness to the created order, predominantly because these paradigms place humanity above the created order in a way that continues to lead to exploitation; Johnson outlines the sheer scale of human destructiveness in startlingly stark terms. She instead argues that humanity needs to understand its interdependence with all living things, and on the basis both of Darwin’s thought and the biblical witness, Johnson argues for a ‘community of creation’ paradigm wherein “each member of (creation) gives and receives, being significant for one another in different ways but all grounded in absolute, universal reliance on the living God for the very breath of life”. The distinctiveness of humanity isn’t denied but re-envisioned so as to emphasize community and mutuality rather than domination: “We all share the status of creaturehood; we are all kin in the evolving community of life now under siege; our vision must be one of flourishing for all.”
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