Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love by Elizabeth A. Johnson (review)

In the face of the largest questions and needs facing our species and planet, an adequate Christian spirituality today needs grounding in a vision of reality capacious enough to hold these questions and needs in their fullest biological complexity and cosmological expanse, a vision informed both by the best of our religious/symbolic traditions and by the best possible scientific accounts of this profoundly interconnected reality we inhabit. Many scholars, poets, and scientists are providing pieces of this expansive and nuanced vision, but few hold together Christian theological poetics and scientific insight with the skill demonstrated in this newest work by Elizabeth Johnson. Johnson, who is Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University, here reads in mutual interrogation two of the most influential classics of traditional Christian and contemporary scientific accounts of this one reality we share: namely the Nicene Creed and Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. In doing so, she has written a brilliant and convincing articulation of a profoundly Christian theology, grounded deeply in Scripture and patristic/ medieval tradition and opening into a vision attentive to biological reality in its fullness: a vision simultaneously scientific, ecological-ethical, and saturated with love. Her book thus provides theological scaffolding toward a Christian spirituality similarly immanent to the wild diversity of creatures and to evolution itself.

Two invitations frame the study, both directing readers’ attention beyond the anthropocentric limits of too many Christian theologies and spiritualities over the millennia, to urge us to learn again to attend to the reality of the natural world in its fullness. The first, found in the book’s title, draws from Job 12:7 ff “Ask the beasts and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.” Just as liberation theologies and spiritualities have for decades been urging the privileged in any context to learn to listen to those on the underside of power, so today those in the most dominant species ever existing on Earth need to learn fundamentally again what it means to listen to the flora and fauna, the water and climate—all calling out to us of the crisis we together face. Her book also draws an invitation from the final pages of Darwin’s Origin: to “consider the entangled bank” of creatures so prolifically alive in the particular places where we each live. Both globally and locally, in the urging of Scripture and of science in this paired invitation, we need to learn to listen to the voices of Earth beyond, beneath, behind the clamor of human words and machines, for the voice of God today.

Within these invitations, laid out in her introduction, Johnson proceeds by means of a double journey: into the Origin of Species and its complexity and continuing impact (three chapters), and into a reading of the Nicene Creed informed by both contemporary neo-Darwinian theory and a generously ecumenical Catholic theological vision (four chapters). Most of the book thus spells out a vision of the creation of the cosmos and the evolution of life in its fullness, prior—as it were—to the human-generated ecological devastation unfolding today. The book’s final two chapters then move to the evolution of human life and its catastrophic current impact on the planet and species, and finally to advocacy for the ecological conversion and ethic an adequate Christian spirituality demands today, for the life of the world.

The volume is magisterial in its breadth and precision, hospitable in its exquisite clarity, and most fitting in its poetry of expression. Any chapter will reward deep scrutiny; space doesn’t permit a full exploration here. Instead, an outline of selected chapters will show some of the significance I see in this work for the study of Christian spirituality in particular. Chapter 3...