Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson (Fordham University) reflects in new book on Creation & God's care

from Article posted online at National Catholic Reporter (http://ncronline.org/ ) Sr. Elizabeth Johnson (a Sister of St. Joseph) says she approached her new project by reading the Nicene Creed and On the Origin of Species as "partners." Ask the Beasts "tells the story of nature through Darwin's eyes, and sees it all through the creed." The first four chapters offer a close reading of Darwin, and Johnson hopes this section will inspire people to read On the Origin of Species so they, too, can experience the feeling of what he was discovering. "He almost couldn't believe it himself," she says. "Darwin saw a profound interrelatedness among organisms in every locale, along with the unity of all life throughout time and space," Johnson observes. "It is a revelation." The creed, she explains, is really a narrative of God's evolutionary relationship to the world. "God makes the universe, comes into the world, goes down into death, rises again. And, with the spirit, God continues to give life to creation and ready it for the life of world to come." Reading it in dialogue with Darwin deepened her appreciation of the idea that God created an evolutionary world. "God the creator made the world with the power to create itself," she says. She found further support for her ideas throughout the Bible. "There are gorgeous nature themes throughout the Scriptures," she says. Unfortunately, a narrow interpretation of Genesis 1:28, where God declares that human beings should have dominion over all of the creatures of the earth, has distorted our understanding of God's relationship to creation. "During the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, we took the notion of dominion and turned it into domination," Johnson notes. Most of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, particularly the Book of Job, suggest a paradigm of "a community of creation, not of human dominion." Our diminished understanding of God's presence in creation can actually be traced back to the Middle Ages, Johnson says, when theologians made a strict distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Though their aim was to protect the Christian understanding of God's free gift of grace, as an indirect consequence, we began to see the work of God only in the supernatural while the natural world became simply a backdrop. "We forgot that creation was also the work of God and that God is present in it," Johnson says. "We began to believe that what is natural is not 'of God' in the same way the supernatural is." 'Breaking twigs off of the tree of life' Unfortunately, God's great work in creation now finds itself radically challenged by human greed, overpopulation, pollution and excessive consumption. Johnson now finds herself issuing laments not about the hierarchy, but for the earth and its creatures. "If you pay attention to the reality of other species, the picture is pretty grim," Johnson says. One conservative estimate suggests that, since 1980, 10 percent of all species have gone extinct, and currently, 350 species are going extinct every day. "We are breaking twigs off of the tree of life," she says. "We are cutting off the promise that they hold within themselves that other creatures within the evolutionary process with develop. "That history will not repeat itself," Johnson continues. "As Jonathan Schell said decades ago, 'When we murder someone, we kill their life. When we make a species go extinct, we kill their birth.' " http://ncronline.org/blogs/grace-margins/book-god-and-darwin-elizabeth-johnson-gets-her-voice-back