by Timothy Eberhart
Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17: In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no vegetation of the field had yet sprung up – for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground, but a stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground – then the Lord God formed the human from the dust of the ground and breathed into their nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there God put the human whom God had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The Lord God took the human and put them in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded them, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.
(Author’s Translation)
It was the winter of 1933. A young lecturer at the University of Berlin named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an emerging theological voice at just 27 years of age, delivered a series of lectures that would later be published under the title Creation and Fall. It was a time of profound social and political upheaval, with a global order still reeling from war and now stressed by hyperinflation and economic depression. The voice and the vision of the Führer, the strong man, had taken hold with promises of a return to national greatness by restoring white Aryan purity through the scapegoating of Jews, gypsies, gays and lesbians, socialists, the disabled and more. Within five years, Bonhoeffer would make first contact with leaders of a resistance movement, and in 10l years’ time, he would be imprisoned and ultimately executed on April 9th, 1945. Bonhoeffer is celebrated as a political theologian, a neo-orthodox theologian, a confessing theologian, and a theologian of crisis. What he’s rarely known for are his contributions as an ecological theologian. Let’s follow along his reading of this ancient story to see what wisdom it might yet hold for us today.
“Then the Lord God formed the human from the dust of the ground and breathed into their nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living being. (Gen. 2:7). “Even Darwin,” Bonhoeffer says, “could not use stronger language…Humankind is derived from…earth…[Our] bond with the earth belongs to [our] essential being.”[1] The Hebrew here is instructive: Adam, the human, is formed from adamah, which means earth, dust, soil, clay, land, ground. Like the animals, whom Bonhoeffer calls our “brothers and sisters… siblings,”[2] we are earth creatures. Similarly, notice that the Latin humanum, human, shares the same root with humus (earth, ground) – and humility. At the molecular level, scientists tell us we’re made up of the same stuff as all other life forms. So too at the genetic level, we share roughly 90 percent of our DNA with mice, dogs, cattle, and elephants, and 98 to 99 percent with chimpanzees.[3] As zoologist David Suzuki writes: “On the most basic level…we are directly…tied to the billions of organisms, past and present, that recycle energy and give us food and air…We are quite literally air, water, soil, energy and other living creatures.”[4] Who are we humans? Who are you? Who am I? From a biblical and a scientific perspective, the answer is the same: we are earthlings. Creaturely kin. “What is to be taken seriously about human existence,” Bonhoeffer says, “is [our shared] bond with mother earth.”[5]
“And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden…[with] the tree of life…in the middle of the garden” (Gen. 2:9). Pay attention to this. The tree of life, Bonhoeffer stresses, is at the center. We are created not to reside in the middle of it all, but in right relationship to the source of life. This, for Bonhoeffer, is a gracious gift.[6] We are most freely, and happily, ourselves, not when we’re self-consumed, turned in upon ourselves, but only when we’re rightly aligned with something much larger, grander and more mysterious: Life. Let’s call it a biocentric – as opposed to an anthropocentric – perspective. Bios-centric. And notice the social implications. In response to those who would divide and rank humans based on race, skin color, ethnicity, geography, nationality, gender identity or sexual orientation, we must insist that white Aryan humanity is not at the center, neither is able-bodied humanity normative humanity, nor cisgendered heterosexual male humanity, nor U.S. western “civilized” humanity, nor even Christian humanity. And by all means, the pursuit of abstract financial profit is no proper center at all. Life, coursing through everything and everyone, is the only center worth orienting our lives around. This is for our good. We are created to flourish when our focus is rightly turned toward the middle of the garden where God has planted the Tree of Life.
In the third chapter of Genesis, as our story unfolds, the humans are told the truth: if you grasp after the fruit of the Tree and transgress the limit, you will be like gods. You will be like gods. From Bonhoeffer’s reading, this is precisely what happens.[7] We grasp after the middle, making ourselves the center of the universe and, in so doing, we wield unfathomable damage and find ourselves far from Eden. In 2009, a team of 28 of the world’s leading earth-systems scientists identified a list of nine planetary boundaries, any of which if crossed threaten human survival. Climate change, ocean acidification, novel entities such as chemical pollution, nitrogen and phosphorus nutrient cycles, freshwater use, land use changes, biodiversity loss, air pollution, and ozone depletion. They concluded that “the exponential growth of human activities is raising concern that [any] further pressure on the Earth System [in any one of these areas] could destabilize critical biophysical systems and trigger abrupt or irreversible environmental changes that would be deleterious or even catastrophic for human well-being.”[8] At the time, four of those boundaries had been transgressed. Researchers now report we’ve crossed six of those boundaries and are close to breaching a seventh.[9]
Now, it’s important to note that, for Bonhoeffer, the damage caused by self-centered grasping impacts both the natural world and our human neighbors. And so, we need to name that those living like gods are not all human beings in general but predominantly wealthy, resource-intensive northern, western, European-American producers and consumers, those who have been least likely to suffer the negative effects of planetary transgression – yet. Inversely, or perversely, those least responsible for environmental degradation – the world’s poor, from so-called under-developed nations, whose skin colors are darker hued, including indigenous peoples, women, children, the elderly – have been and continue to be those suffering the worst effects. The truth is that some are living as if they’re at the center of the universe, pretending to be gods; and the terrible truth is that the wages of social and ecological sin is the untimely death of so many others.
These have been humbling years. So many of the aspirations many of us had imagined for the world seem to be coming undone. The headlines speak of decline, unravelling, even collapse; and it’s not too difficult, if we step back in a reflective mode, to name what that has meant in our own lives. What is difficult, as members of a culture fixated on endless growth andtaught to believe in continual progress, is knowing how to navigate descent. Like so many of our spiritual ancestors, Bonhoeffer points here to Jesus. God, he says, did not become human so that we might become like gods. Rather, God humbled Godself and became human so that we might become more truly human. For “it is only through the depths of earth that the window of eternity opens itself up to us,” he writes. And here I’ll quote him at length: “Those who would abandon the earth, who would flee the crisis of the present, will lose all the power still sustaining them by means of eternal, mysterious powers.”[10] He continues, “When life begins to be difficult and oppressive, one [seeks to leap] boldly into the air and [soar], relieved and worry-free, into the so-called eternal realm. One leapfrogs over the present, scorns the Earth.” But “Christ does not lead [us] into the otherworldliness of escapism. Rather, Christ returns [us] to the Earth as its true [children]”[11] And so “Christians do not have an ultimate escape route out of their earthly tasks and difficulties…Like Christ [we are] to drink the cup of earthly life to the dregs.”[12] We have known something of that cup in these years. Many of us can appreciate the desire to flee: to flee the body, flee the earth, flee this historical moment. At just such a time as this, Christ is fully present to us, humbly revealing the way: This is my body, this is my blood, do this in remembrance of me.
So, here’s the invitation. We’re being called back to our first vocation, our primary calling, every one of us: to till and keep the earth. The Hebrew word for till, abad, means to serve, to work for, to revere – the earth. And to keep, samar, means to watch, guard, protect, treasure – the earth. Let me put it this way: We need to get our hands dirty. Seriously, Church has got to be more earthy, the spiritual life more super-natural, as in superbly, supremely natural. Right? Imagine, within 10 years’ time: wherever you come upon a Christian congregation, anywhere in the world, what you encounter looks and feels like a Garden of Eden bursting with apple trees and raspberry bushes, native flowers and grasses, just humming with pollinators, songbirds and butterflies. As you step onto the grounds, your spirit is replenished as you’re welcomed by the vibrancy of life, a tangible witness to God’s capacity to bring about a new creation, a healed creation, already in this life. Picture then all of the teeming home yards and gardens of church members, the many workplace regenerative land-use initiatives, and the environmental justice efforts taken up to ensure that all citizens, all neighborhoods, enjoy equal access to the goods of tree canopies and park spaces and healthy food sources.
Can you see it? Bonhoeffer’s vision of a more “worldly” Christianity is coming to fruition and the call of discipleship has become an invitation “not to a new religion, but to life,” because “righteousness and the Kingdom of God on earth” is now “the focus of everything”[13] it means to be to be Christian, to follow Jesus, to be fully human. This is the calling of our time, our first vocation: to serve and treasure the earth.
Not long after Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor of Germany, Bonhoeffer wrote of the church’s obligation, “not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel” of any social order that is antithetical to “the good of all” (Gal. 6:10) but, if necessary, “to seize the wheel itself.”[14] It’s possible that atmospheric physicist, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a German, was thinking of Bonhoeffer, when in reference to climate tipping points said: “I am telling you that we are putting our children into a global school bus that will with [all] probability end in a deadly crash.”[15] Friends, we have no time to wait, for any more catastrophes to motivate us into bold action. There’s still so much we can yet save, so much we must save—through resistance, through repentance, through regeneration and repair. And so inspired by our spiritual ancestors, keeping the way of Jesus at the center, our feet humbly rooted on the ground, for the sake of future generations, let us be found faithful to our high and mighty calling: to give our bodies, our very lifeblood – whatever it takes – in reverent service and protective care for the healing of the Earth.
Benediction
In his final writings, The Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer looked back at the previous decade of his life, and wrote: “The ultimately responsible question is not how I extricate myself heroically from a situation, but [how] a coming generation is to live?”[16] May this generation be found faithful to our calling, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, guided by the Good Shepherd, our brother in suffering, and enlivened by the Spirit, the resurrecting Lord of Life, to seek first God’s universal kin-dom. That it may be on earth, as it is in heaven. Amen.
Timothy Eberhart is the Robert and Marilyn Degler McClean Associate Professor of Ecological Theology and Practice at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, where he directs the Center for Ecological Regeneration. He teaches in the areas of theology and ethics, concentrating on the relation of Christian doctrine to ecological, economic, political and social change theories and practices.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3, DBWE 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 76.
[2] Bonhoeffer, 96.
[3] James F. Crow, “Unequal by Nature: A Geneticist’s Perspective on Human Differences,” Dædalus 131, no. 1 (2002): 81, https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/unequal-nature-geneticists-perspective-human-differences.
[4] David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature (Vancouver, B.C.: Greystone, 1997).
[5] Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 77.
[6] Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 84ff.
[7] Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 112ff.
[8] Rockström, J. et al. “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14(2): 32.
[9] Damien Gayle, “Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, health check shows,” The Guardian, Sept. 23, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/23/earth-breach-planetary-boundaries-health-check-oceans.
[10] Bonhoeffer, “Basic Questions of a Christian Ethics,” Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928-1931, DBWE 10 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 377-78.
[11] Bonhoeffer, “Thy Kingdom Come! The Prayer of the Church-Community for God’s Kingdom on Earth,” Berlin: 1932-1933 DBWE 12 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 286.
[12] Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison DBWE 8 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 447-48.
[13] Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 482, 373.
[14] Bonhoeffer, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” Berlin, 365.
[15] Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, quoted by Danijel Višević (@visevic), “Ich sage Ihnen, dass wir unsere Kinder in einen globalen Schulbus hineinschieben, der mit 98% Wahrscheinlichkeit tödlich verunglückt,” X, August 26, 2021, 4:53pm, https://x.com/visevic/status/1431012057143463937.
[16] Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” Letters and Papers, 42.
