From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World by Norman Wirzba (review)

In From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World, Norman Wirzba makes a clear and compelling argument that the Christian doctrine of creation offers a critical moral vision that can counteract the destructive forms of modern subjectivity. Wirzba calls for a renarration of the world as creation, seeing it not as a lifeless machine meant to satisfy our insatiable desires but “as created, sustained, and daily loved by God” (10). Seeing the world as creation returns humanity to our “creaturely identity,” which “goes to the heart of human identity and vocation” (97), and it can help cultivate habits of gratitude and of taking delight in the world, which better enable us to love the world as God does.

As part of a series on “The Church and Postmodern Culture,” this book engages various contemporary postmodern thinkers such as Marion, Levinas, and Derrida, as well as theological voices like Bonhoeffer and Schmemann. The prose is lucid and well-structured and is geared for a nonspecialist audience, so it is accessible to upper level-undergraduates and scholars alike. Wirzba covers a wide range of topics and authors seamlessly, extensively, and with great nuance, so even experts in eco-theology and ethics will deem this a landmark argument for the centrality of the doctrine of creation and its role in addressing today’s ecological disasters.

The book contains five chapters. The first chapter depicts the sense of alienation and confusion in modernity, which Wirzba defines as the “eclipse of creation,” in which nonhumans are no longer “members within a divine drama of creation, redemption and sanctification” and “humans cease to be creatures of God” (11). Chapter 2 diagnoses modernity’s idolatrous view of nature which configures nature as a mechanism, humans as conquering masters, and God as irrelevant (47). Humans identify themselves as consumers and tend to view the world “as one vast store or warehouse of commodities available for purchase” (39–40). Wirzba draws on Marion’s and Levinas’s analysis of idols, our innate desire to know the world, and how idols lead to a kind of violence, in this case the totalizing power of commodification. Chapter 3 pivots, moving from the idolatry of consumerism towards an “iconic modality of perception” (62) that views the world as creation. Pairing contemporary thinkers like Marion and Guy Debord with the monastic and iconographic traditions, Wirzba depicts ways the Christian tradition corrects our flawed human vision, guiding us to view creation with the love and delight with which God views the world (75). In contrast to an idol, an icon disciplines and cleanses our perception so we learn to see that “creation is the good and beautiful place in which God’s love is forever at work” (86).

In chapters 4 and 5, Wirzba fills out the “art of creaturely life.” As the editor of a collection of Wendell Berry’s essays, Wirzba is deeply attuned to the importance of farming and of regaining an appreciation for the miracle of food. He returns to the creation narratives in Genesis to argue that “human creaturely identity and vocation come together in the work of gardening,” patterned after God who is the “Essential Gardener” (104). For Wirzba, “food is God’s love made delectable” (124). In chapter 5 Wirzba revisits a postmodern debate on gift-giving, incisively critiquing Derrida’s conception of the gift by offering a Christian understanding of gratitude as an acknowledgement of our inescapable dependence on others and our desire to live in responsible relationship with others because of our shared membership in creation (147–50).

Many current ecologically oriented theologians have emphasized the importance of creation, and Wirzba’s book is a major addition to this field. He beautifully synthesizes decades of theological scholarship with a profound engagement with contemporary postmodern thought, and so fashions an eloquent proposal for reimagining humanity’s belonging in...