Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T23:39:44.876Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A Reading of Westcott's Gospel of Creation: An Early Venture into Ecological Theology?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2013

Abstract

In response to the contemporary ecological movement, ecological perspectives have become a significant theme in the theology of creation. This paper asks whether antecedents to this growing significance might predate the concerns of our times and be discernible within the diverse interests of nineteenth-century Anglican thinking. The means used here to examine this possibility is a close reading of B. F. Westcott's ‘Gospel of Creation’. This will be contextualized in two directions: first with reference to the understanding of the natural world in nineteenth-century English popular thought, and secondly with reference to the approach taken to the doctrine of creation by three late twentieth-century Anglican writers, two concerned with the relationship between science and theology in general, and a third concerned more specifically with ecology.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Journal of Anglican Studies Trust 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1.

Honorary Research Associate, MCD University of Divinity, Melbourne.

References

2. Hymns Ancient and Modern, for Use in the Services of the Church (London: William Clowes, 2nd edn, 1875).Google Scholar

3. Although ecological theology is by nature ecumenical, I confine myself to Anglican thinkers in this paper because it originated as a discussion paper for the bilateral Anglican–Orthodox dialogue, as a way of outlining specifically Anglican approaches to ecological theology.Google Scholar

4. Rigby, C., Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), p. 13.Google Scholar

5. Rigby, Topographies, p. 17.Google Scholar

6. Rigby, Topographies, p. 19.Google Scholar

7. Rigby, Topographies, p. 18.Google Scholar

8. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, available at http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/friedrich_nietzsche_quotes.html (accessed 12 April 2013).Google Scholar

9. Rigby, Topographies, pp. 64–65. Australian readers should be aware of the extraordinary significance of place in Aboriginal ontology. See Swain, T., A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Rigby, Topographies, p. 236.Google Scholar

11. Rigby, Topographies, p. 237.Google Scholar

12. Rigby, Topographies, p. 240.Google Scholar

13. This tradition in English poetry is to be seen as early as Thomas Traherne (1636/7–1674), whose relevance to the ecological crisis has been noted in Allchin, A.M., The World Is a Wedding: Explorations in Christian Spirituality (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1978), p. 83. See also P. Armstrong, The English Parson Naturalist: A Companionship between Science and Religion (Leominster: Gracewing, 2000) on Anglican forerunners of the ecological movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Google Scholar

14. Westcott, B.F., Social Aspects of Christianity (London: Macmillan, 1887), p. 90.Google Scholar

15. Graham Patrick sees Westcott's fascination with bridges as symbolic of his life-long commitment to the reconciling of contradictory positions, politically as well as theologically. Patrick, G.A., The Miners’ Bishop: Brooke Foss Westcott (Peterborough: Epworth, 2002), p. x.Google Scholar

16. Link-Wieczorek, U., ‘Mediating Anglicanism: Maurice, Gore and Temple’, in D. Fergusson (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 282284.Google Scholar

17. Thompson, D., Cambridge Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Enquiry, Controversy and Truth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 103.Google Scholar

18. Westcott, B.F., Thoughts on Revelation and Life (ed. S. Phillips; London: Macmillan, 1887), p. 247.Google Scholar

19. Westcott, Thoughts on Revelation and Life, p. 247.Google Scholar

20. Westcott, B.F., The Gospel of the Resurrection: Thoughts on its Relation to Reason and History (London: Macmillan, 1889), pp. 2122.Google Scholar

21. Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, p. 157.Google Scholar

22. Polkinghorne, J., The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), p. 11.Google Scholar

23. Polkinghorne, Faith of a Physicist, p. 33.Google Scholar

24. Polkinghorne, Faith of a Physicist, p. 120.Google Scholar

25. Polkinghorne, Faith of a Physicist, p. 135.Google Scholar

26. Polkinghorne, Faith of a Physicist, pp. 64–65.Google Scholar

27. Polkinghorne, Faith of a Physicist, p. 86. The language of stewardship is, as Norman Habel points out, rather more problematic than Polkinghorne allows; see Habel, N., ‘Geophany: The Earth Story in Genesis 1’, in N. Habel and S. Wurst (eds.), The Earth Story in Genesis (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), pp. 4647; and N. Habel, The Birth, the Curse and the Greening of Earth: An Ecological Reading of Genesis 1–11 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011).Google Scholar

28. Polkinghorne, Faith of a Physicist, p. 87.Google Scholar

29. Peacocke, A., Theology for a Scientific Age (enlarged edn; London: SCM Press, 1990), p. 234.Google Scholar

30. Peacocke, Scientific Age, pp. 214–48.Google Scholar

31. Peacocke, Scientific Age, p. 254.Google Scholar

32. Southgate, C.et al., God, Humanity and the Cosmos: A Textbook in Science and Religion (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999), pp. 261267.Google Scholar

33. Northcott, M., A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2007), p. 69.Google Scholar

34. Northcott, Moral Climate, pp. 64–65.Google Scholar

35. Northcott, Moral Climate, p. 65.Google Scholar

36. Northcott, Moral Climate, p. 116.Google Scholar

37. Northcott, Moral Climate, p. 117.Google Scholar

38. Northcott, Moral Climate, p. 143.Google Scholar

39. Northcott, Moral Climate, p. 173.Google Scholar

40. Northcott, Moral Climate, p. 177.Google Scholar

41. Northcott, Moral Climate, p. 274.Google Scholar

42. Westcott, B.F., ‘The Gospel of Creation’, in The Epistles of St John: the Greek Text with Notes and Essays (London: Macmillan, 2nd edn, 1886), pp. 285328.Google Scholar

43. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 287.Google Scholar

44. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 288.Google Scholar

45. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 288.Google Scholar

46. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 289.Google Scholar

47. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 293.Google Scholar

48. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, pp. 308–12.Google Scholar

49. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, pp. 313–15.Google Scholar

50. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 315.Google Scholar

51. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. x.Google Scholar

52. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. xi.Google Scholar

53. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, pp. 317–28.Google Scholar

54. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 319.Google Scholar

55. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 319.Google Scholar

56. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 319, n. 1.Google Scholar

57. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, pp. 319–20.Google Scholar

58. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 320.Google Scholar

59. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 321.Google Scholar

60. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 321.Google Scholar

61. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 322.Google Scholar

62. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 322.Google Scholar

63. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 323.Google Scholar

64. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 323.Google Scholar

65. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 323. Alan Cadwallader (personal communication, 24 April 2013) writes ‘Indeed this is part of the method drilled into BFW (and so many others in the mid 19th century) to build an account of every item of creation (it explains his hunt for samples of every fern, or rock, for his collection – all carefully labelled). Only by knowing the intricacies of the parts can we gain a sense of what the whole might look like (keeping open to the limitations on knowledge of course). This needless to say drove his grammatical analysis of the biblical text. He would find nuances in the aorist for example that escaped most mortals.’Google Scholar

66. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 323.Google Scholar

67. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, pp. 323–24.Google Scholar

68. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 324.Google Scholar

69. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 324.Google Scholar

70. Alan Cadwallader (personal communication, 24 April 2013) notes‘ “the overcoming of Satan” … has important implications for Westcott's thought, firstly in his essentially Origenist understanding of the personification of evil as a temporary aberration; secondly as a necessary call to redress (mainly social) evil as a participation in the restoration and perfecting that characterises God's activity; thirdly as a demonstration that the fundamental goodness of humanity, not the aberrations need to be affirmed through such social(ist) action. It explains why he was such a proponent of nineteenth century “cooperativism” (more on the Owen model than the Marxist, but dialoging with both).’Google Scholar

71. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 324.Google Scholar

72. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 325.Google Scholar

73. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 326.Google Scholar

74. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 327.Google Scholar

75. Westcott, ‘Gospel of Creation’, p. 328.Google Scholar

76. Patrick, English Parson Naturalist, p. 85.Google Scholar

77. L. White, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, at http://www.uvm.edu/~gflomenh/ENV-NGO-PA395/articles/Lynn-White.pdf (accessed 22 April 2013).Google Scholar

78. Patrick, English Parson Naturalist, p. 126. Cf. Westcott, , The Gospel of Life (London: Macmillan, 1892), pp. 9697: ‘Even the rudest demon-worship contains the germ of this feeling by which the worshipper seeks to be at one with some power which is adverse to him. It is a witness to something in man by which he is naturally constituted to feel after a harmonious fellowship with all that of which he is conscious, with the unseen, with the infinite, no less than with the seen and the material’. I am very grateful to Dr Alan Cadwallader for this and a number of other additions and corrections to this paper.Google Scholar

79. Rowan Williams, ‘The Climate Crisis: A Christian Response’, Annual Lecture to Operation Noah, 13 October 2012, available at http://www.operationnoah.org/node/90 (accessed 19 April 2013).Google Scholar

80. Cited in Patrick, English Parson Naturalist, pp. 43–44.Google Scholar