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58 Chapter 3 The Sacramental Value of the Variety of Life In a frequently told and possibly apocryphal story, a member of the Christian clergy anxious to engage in dialogue asked the early-twentieth -century biologist John Haldane what his studies of the natural world had taught him about its creator. Haldane replied that God seems to have “an inordinate fondness for beetles,” referencing the hundreds of thousands of distinct species of the insect already cataloged and the uncountable others that human beings have never seen. A noted atheist , Haldane was likely annoyed by the question and hoping his answer would shock the clergyman away from a follow-up. From my perspective as a Christian ecological ethicist, however, I am delighted by the exchange and seek in this book to imitate the questioner by expanding my theology in dialogue with scientists. In this chapter I ask a very similar question: What can we learn about God by studying God’s creation? I hope to receive a more thoughtful answer than Haldane’s, but his offers a powerful starting point: What does it tell us about God’s world that more than 350,000 species of beetle have evolved and now exist, and how should a fact like this change the ways we live, relate to one another, and think about God? In other words, what does it mean for Christians to understand biodiversity as part of God’s creation, and what difference does the variety of life make to Christian morality? This chapter offers answers by developing a sacramental Christian ethics, an argument that we have a responsibility to the variety of life in God’s world in part because we come to know God better through it. Biodiversity, I argue, is sacramental because it is a sign of and connection to the mysteries and workings of God. This calls Christians to take seriously the variety and wonder of life as well as the reality of predation and death inherent in God’s world. The argument develops straightforwardly: if we can understand God by understanding God’s creation, then we should strive to understand the variety of life within that creation. If we are to understand our role in this world, then we must understand our fundamental relatedness to that variety, including our relationship to the marvels of The Sacramental Value of the Variety of Life 59 biodiversity and to the death necessary to it. These steps are the intellectual and moral structure of a Christian argument about biodiversity ’s value, forming the sacramental basis of the rest of this book and beginning to offer an answer to how we should respond to God’s apparently inordinate fondness for beetles, trees, owls, and human beings. The Idea of Sacramentality Many Christian denominations and churches have longstanding and deep sacramental traditions, ritual practices that establish a link between the world and God. While there are important arguments about the details, most Christians agree that the bread and wine of communion are sacramental, that they bear the presence of God in a meaningful way. One crucial root of this belief is biblical: as the Gospel of Matthew records, Jesus ate with his disciples, blessed bread while saying, “Take, eat, this is my body,” and gave thanks for wine while saying, “Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood” (26:26–27). This is the basis of a sacrament , a belief that the incarnate God is present in bread and wine. Similarly, the water of baptism is widely believed to be holy, to represent the relationship between the baptized person, her community, and God. Indeed, the same gospel reports that Jesus’ public ministry began only after his baptism: “just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him” (3:16). Here the water, like the bread and wine of communion, plays an important role: a material substance represents something important in the mediation of God and the world. Sacraments are real, material things that connect Christian communities to our creator. Sacraments are also mysteries, demonstrating the limits of our ability to fully understand God and God’s working in our world. We do not and cannot fully understand baptism and communion, and so they connect us to the mysteries of the divine. The claim of sacramentality broadens from these particular sacraments to an argument about the material world as a...

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