Nature and the Bible

I’ll be honest, I had never considered that the importance of nature – or lack thereof – would ever really be included in a religious discussion. To me, the two subjects of nature and God are related only in the fact that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” (Genesis 1:1) and that’s about it. I went to a very strict Christian school for all of my elementary and middle school years and, as a result, read the Bible often. Of course, I was not any kind of a Biblical expert, but I understood enough then to apply the knowledge now that nature was not really a subject that seemed like a priority within the Bible’s pages. (To me, this doesn't seem apparent in Genesis - especially the pieces where we are told that to let the earth and its creatures live in fear of us. image courtesy of:http://www.northernsun.com/images/imagethumb/%20God%20Is%20Nature%20Bumper%20Sticker%20(7071).jpg)

This is confusing to me, now that I think about it. Take Lawrence E. Sullivan’s argument that, “from the point of view of environmental studies, religious worldview propels communities into the world with common concern and the constructive conceptual basis for rethinking our current estrangement from the earth,” (Course Anthology, 27-28). The more I think about it, the more I think that he is right. I mean, if we are to be good stewards of what God has given us, as I was constantly told in Sunday school when I was a little girl, then does this not mean the earth too? Does this not mean that we must protect our environment so that, as Virgil says, “waving corn-crops shall to golden grow [and] from the wild briar shall hang the blushing grape,” (Course Anthology, 124)? I know that many environmental groups say that it is so, that God has made earth and given us the responsibility to protect and maintain it. (Do we or do we not have the God-given responsibility to protect this? image courtesy of:http://blogs.targetx.com/pbu/Trevor/Nature_Mountains.jpg).

Yet, in rereading the book of Genesis especially, this is not what I came to read. God told Noah to, “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,” (Genesis 9:1) and yet, within the same chapter of the Bible, he also says that we are to “be the terror and the dread of all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven, of everything that crawls on the ground and all the fish in the sea; they are handed over to you,” (Genesis 9:2-3) and that "every moving thing shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things," (Genesis 9:3). God created man to be great, I understand that. But we have been destroyed by nature before. Tsunamis, avalanches, earthquakes, hurricanes – nature has a power over us that we cannot match, even with all of our deforestation and water depletion we wreak upon it. It just does not make sense to me that more of an emphasis on nature’s gifts to us via God – and that less about how we are so great and powerful, which seems contradictory perhaps to the New Testament of the Bible where man is so sinful that God must send his own Son down as salvation for mankind - is not made in the Bible.