Does Nature Need to be Redeemed? Zygon 1994
Am Academy of Religion 1992

"Does Nature Need To Be Redeemed?" Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 29(1994):205-229.

Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/36766

Article awarded John Templeton Foundation award for best scholarly papers in religion, 1994.

Plenary address at Conference on "Creation, Ecology, and Ethics," Chicago, October 1992. Also invited address at American Academy of Religion, National Meeting, San Francisco, November 1992.

In the light of evolutionary biology, the biblical idea that nature fell with the coming of human sin is incredible. Biblical writers, classical theologians, and contemporary biologists are ambivalent about nature, finding in natural history both a remarkable genesis of life and also much travail and suffering. Earth is a land of promise, and there is the conservation, or redemption, of life in the midst of its perpetual perishing. Life is perennially a struggling through to something higher. In that sense even natural history is cruciform, though human sinfulness introduces novel tragedy. Humans now threaten creation; nature is at more peril than ever before.