Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- General editor's preface
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Frogs, floods and famines
- 2 The origins of the environmental crisis
- 3 The turn to nature
- 4 The flowering of ecotheology
- 5 The order of creation
- 6 Creation, redemption and natural law ethics
- 7 Natural law and ecological society
- Notes
- Index
- New Studies in Christian Ethics
5 - The order of creation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- General editor's preface
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Frogs, floods and famines
- 2 The origins of the environmental crisis
- 3 The turn to nature
- 4 The flowering of ecotheology
- 5 The order of creation
- 6 Creation, redemption and natural law ethics
- 7 Natural law and ecological society
- Notes
- Index
- New Studies in Christian Ethics
Summary
In this chapter I intend to demonstrate that the Hebrew Bible, which is central to the religious traditions of Judaism and Christianity, presents the non-human world as a created order which is redolent of the purposes and providence of the creator God, though it is ontologically distinct from the being of God. The purposive order of the cosmos reflects the will and design of the creator. But this order and purposiveness does not exist in a relational vacuum. The Hebrew Bible offers a fundamentally interactive account of the relations between the human self, the social order and natural ecological order, and between all of these and the being of God. This understanding of the interaction between humans, nature and God offers a significant contrast with modern ethical individualism and subjectivism. The Hebrews believed that moral values and purposes were enshrined in the nature of created order. Similarly the Christian doctrine of natural law represents a belief in the moral purposiveness and relationality of the cosmos, and in the relation between the human quest for the common good and the goodness of created order and the other orders of being which inhabit the creation. Thus the moral life may not be reduced to individual human intuitions and emotions, nor may moral judgement be limited to human experience and society. Rather the physical reality of created order, the community of human and non-human species and the ends and purposes which they differently serve, are given in the nature of the creation, and this is why in so many diverse cultures, with no shared religious revelation or truth system, ethical principles such as neighbour love, sexual fidelity and care for the natural environment are widely practised.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Environment and Christian Ethics , pp. 164 - 198Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996