The Examined Faith
The Examined Faith is a podcast for those who want to take their faith seriously. Hosted by Tuppy Morrissey, it brings together theologians, historians, and writers to explore the intellectual and spiritual depths of the Christian tradition, the interpretation of Scripture, what it means to believe in the modern world and more.
The Examined Faith
How to Be a Human Being - Charles Foster
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Creation, Theosis, and Becoming Human: Charles Foster on Orthodox Christianity, Nature, Animals, and the Image of God
Host Tuppy Morrissey interviews Oxford fellow and writer Professor Charles Foster about creation and what it means to be human, drawing on Foster’s book Being a Human and his nature-immersion experiments. Foster argues modern life estranges us from the cosmos and that humans are shaped more by encounter than ideas. The discussion covers animism, panpsychism and the Orthodox idea that God “fills all things,” technology’s effects on attention, vegetarian ideals in Genesis, practical reforms for animal welfare and education, humans as mediators/microcosm, the Incarnation’s affirmation of matter, cosmic redemption, and Foster’s reading of Genesis as anti-polytheistic and portraying rising disobedience in creation.
We're wild creatures designed for constant ecstatic contact with earth, heaven, trees, and gods, and wonder why lives built on the premise that we are mere machines and spent in centrally heated, electronically lit greenhouses seem suboptimal. So, Charles, as we sit in our electronically lit greenhouses, uh I apologize, as I take it, you're a little dissatisfied with the way we live now. Of course I am.
SPEAKER_01Uh I and everyone else and society in general can do a lot better than we do. So I hope that everyone the cosmos is an extraordinary coruscating place. We should be dissatisfied with our limited knowledge of it and our limited appreciation of it and our limited ability to inhabit it as intimate place. Where creatures may be in the image of God if the Christians are right. Um and that Christian commission is to make that image real and full. The the project of theosis. Um so as long as it bleeds in each of us, of course, we should be dissatisfied. And I I guess the trick is being dissatisfied but also grateful and secure and in a way content and in another way wholly discontent. It's a difficult balance.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Yeah, it's a healthy dissatisfaction. Um that's that's a helpful uh distinction to make, I think. Well, today um I'm very happy to be joined by Professor Charles Foster, a writer and a fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, to explore creation and what it means to be a human being. My name is Tuppy Morrissey, and welcome to the third episode of The Examined Faith. Thank you very much, Charles, for joining me today.
SPEAKER_01It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00Great. Um well let's dive in uh a bit more to your book, Um Being a Human, which I recently read and I I really um enjoyed it very much. Um in it, you tried to rediscover what it actually means to be a human by uh inhabiting three different eras of our history. What inspired you to go on that search? Well, I mean lots of reasons.
SPEAKER_01One was I wanted to have fun with my son Tom in a wood in the Darwisha Peak district that I love. But uh, I suppose at the bottom, I wanted to know what sort of creature I am. And I am a human being, although some of my friends would disagree. Um, but I wanted to know what that meant. Um we can find out something about what it means to be a human from seeing where we've come from, from retracing, in so far as we can, some of the steps we've taken on our journey to the point where we are at the moment, uh, by experiencing some of the relationships with the non-human world that made us the shape that we are. I've spent a lot of my life now in the academic world, and that's given me a distrust for top-down theories. It's given me a distrust of the sort of intellectual history that is worked out in libraries. Um, a distrust for uh the assumption that ideas are primary. Um we're changed not primarily by ideas, but by encounters. So I went into the wood to have tried to have the sort of encounters with uh human history at pivotal moments uh in our human story, um, and to work out what that should mean for the way that we live now.
SPEAKER_00Okay, and in those encounters um with the elements of the wood, you seem to emphasize our continuity with uh animal life, uh non-human animals. Um, as you and your son Tom, as you mentioned, spend time in the wood and you're sort of foraging for berries, you eat roadkill, I think, at one point, and you're sort of eschewing a sedentary lifestyle. Um, do you think Christian theology has sometimes exaggerated the difference between human beings and non-human animals?
SPEAKER_01Well, it's been unnuanced in discussing the difference. Um it's often felt unnecessarily threatened by acknowledging the basic facts that we have non-human animals not all that long ago. That we share much of our evolutionary history with, for example, badgers of foxes. Um we share most of our physiology and anatomy with them. We share quite a lot of our psychology with them. And we're not going to make any theological progress on those facts, or if we fail to face them squarely. We plainly have evolutionary continuity with non-human animals, but that doesn't begin to mean that we're not different. So there's continuity between a caterpillar and a butt by different things. Um of course humans are special. I think all humans acknowledge it. Imagine a passionate vegan driving down the road. Um here in here in England, we drive on the left hand. Uh imagine that on the left-hand side of the road there's a human child, on the right hand side there's a deer. Um, unless the vegan swerves to the right hand side, which will involve killing the deer, they're gonna kill the child. Um, every vegan is gonna kill right. Um, or every decent vegan. Every decent vegan would kill a herd of deer to save the child. Um they might rail against speciesism and might be right to do it in some contexts, but they acknowledge uh when the chip are down and they're right to do so.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, that's a helpful analogy of the sort of modern day um trolley problem, uh, bringing veganism. Um yeah, I wonder what Peter Singer um might respond to that. But I think you're you're quite right that most people, when uh push comes to shove, would prioritize human life. So what do you think it means? You mentioned earlier that if the Christians are right, we're made in the image of God. What do you think that means? Is it a question of our ability to reason, to have relationships, uh something to do with our vocation or something else entirely? It's about all of those things.
SPEAKER_01Um and it's about many other things. It's about dignity, for example. Um say God is the quintessentially dignified uh principle. Um because God's in everything and made everything the Imagade, one might say, is about everything. Uh but in relation to rationality, relationship, vocation sun, um, God is rational. So yes, the Imagade is about rationality, God is relationship, and it is desperate for relationship with us, and so the Imagade is about relationship. God's engaged in the project of sustaining and redeeming the creation, and so the Imagade is about vocation. Uh the image of God in all humans donates the same vocation towards all other humans as God had towards us. I mean, one one comment. Um I I think we've got to be really careful about relying too much on lists of attributes which are associated with the magade. So rationality, for example, for example. I mean, it's simply not true that if a human is not rational, they cease to be fashioned in the image of God. So uh people with profound cognitive disorders, children, uh anaesthetized patients, uh patient in vegetative states. Do they cease to be fashioned in the image of God? No. Um I think one of the uh great uh do that one again. One of the other really important wrong moves in medical ethics, which is uh something of what I spend my life doing, um, is to be too respectful towards Kant. So Kant located dignity in that excludes the label dignity from lots of the uh categories of people I've just mentioned. It it would mean that a a patient in permanent vegetative state um wasn't dignified and shouldn't be given the uh the sort of protection which dignity gives. Um i i image in Greek is icon. Uh and in the orthodox tradition, uh which is my own tradition, um, icons are doors. Um each human uh can and should be a door to the divine. Um one thing that the image of God certainly entails, it would seem to me, is that humans are a sort of regent in relation to the ruling of creation. So exercising uh divine dominion by proxy by proxy. Do that then again. Um exercising divine dominion by proxy. Um is of course one of the most disastrously misunderstood and abused ideas in the Bible. It's often been taken as a license to exploit without limit, to build, to kill, to extract, to befoul and so on. Exactly the opposite of what the mean um you know there's nothing good to use the Genesis word about the building for a pipeline across a pristine wilderness. Uh to mean species extinct is not only to destroy an emanation of God in which he uh depends on that species, it diminishes the wholeness of the world, the the very goodness of the world, which is how at the end of the um of one of the creation stories uh the whole creation is described. So that the real meaning, um and this is trite, I hope, i it is not licensed, but uh an onerous, joyous duty. Um that that same duty which compels hunter-gatherers, uh, and we sort of uh most of our the hunter-gatherer has to kill and soul things to eat, um, to have a real problem eating, because you know, to kill to eat, whether you're killing a plant or a or or an animal, requires an elaborate choreography of request and thanks and propitiation. So it's that sort of ethos uh which uh should inflect uh the way that we um adopt this stewardship responsibility.
SPEAKER_00Okay, there's a lot um I want to to unpack there. I might start with um what you were talking about at the end in terms of the insolment of other beings. I read your article, um, What If Stones Had Souls, and you write uh over the 40,000 years or so of the history of behaviourally modern humans, the overwhelming majority of generations have been, so far as we can see, animist. They have that is believed that all or most things, human and otherwise, have some sort of soul. Um, which you just sort of explained just now. Do you think that sort of view um is something that some orthodox or smaller orthodox Christians would be uncomfortable with? The idea that a stone or the the cow that you eat for your dinner has a has a soul?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think it's compatible with uh orthodox Christianity, um, and I think the converse is compatible with it as well. Uh views have differed. Um I think much of the confusion about this results from something that we've touched the soul in terms of rational autonomy. Uh, I've already expressed my concerns about that. I've suggested some of the reasons for that concern. Um it it may be useful in trying to discuss this question to to talk about the whole question of whether uh there's consciousness infusing everything. So it is plains some relationship between consciousness and matter. So the matter of my brain affects in some way how conscious I am. If I have a road traffic accident and my bra my brain issued, uh my consciousness is affected. Uh but the nature of that relationship between the matter of my brain and the consciousness which I have is very mysterious. I mean, to give a coherent explanation of how uh consciousness can arise from unconscious matter, which has led uh a number of people uh in mainstream philosophical discourse to uh the simplest explanation is that matter is not unconscious. Uh so pan panpsychism uh it's got a very very distinguished history, uh Whitehead, Nagel, Strawson uh lots of people um and how does that uh feed into this theological discussion? Well, it may mean that uh the consciousness which inhabits, for example, a badger, or on a more difficult example, inhabits a stone, um is uh some sort of divine consciousness, uh which takes us to uh the notion of panentheism, not pantheism, which is the the idea that God is that that everything is God that God is in everything is an extremely ancient and uh orthodox tradition. Um so I myself am Greek Orthodox, I begin the morning by saying Holy Spirit and filling all things. Um that is the pantheistic belief, and it's a belief which I think does uh a lot of justice to the intuitions that we feel about that the feeling that we are close to God when we walk through a wood, the feeling that we're close to God when we look into the eyes of our beloved dog or whatever it is.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And do you think um why do you think we've become so estranged from now? Obviously, that's a huge question. Do you think it stems from uh the fall um that we read in Genesis 3? Um, and or is it uh a more recent issue uh with the rise of technology? You know, you you mentioned as you we were getting set up that you you don't like technology. I'm not a great fan. Either has that uh led to our sort of divorce from the natural world.
SPEAKER_01I mean certainly technology has affected our ability to pay attention. Uh and if you don't pay attention to anything, whether it's a bird or a friend, uh your relationship with it is going to become dysfunctional. Um is technology a consequence of the fall? Well, maybe. I mean it's certainly true that it is certainly true that that's a bad thing. If we think that all bad things come from the fall, then it follows that the estrangement is a consequence of the fall. Um the fall that the fall of the biblical story led to humans being expelled from the god. That was a place where there was apparently perfect harmony between everything, harmony that's going to be restored at the time of the redemption of the cosmos, a redemption that's described in Isaiah's vision of the holy mountain, where there's no killing, where the world flooded the lamb and so on. Um and in that context, it's worth noting that the original order of things was entirely vegetarian. Um in the Hebrew Bible, you know, God seems to have a horror of predation. Um and uh lots of lots of the things which uh evidence our own estrangement from the natural world are a sort of metaphorized uh type of predation. Uh cutting down the forests, uh building the pipelines, which I've mentioned. Um but that vegetarian world, the the predator-free world, is the world that was said to be very good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um Yeah, and even in um the Acts of the Apostles, when the sort of the Council of Jerusalem comes together, they uh one of their rulings for um the sort of the early Christians is to avoid eating uh the blood from from animals. Um Well, right.
SPEAKER_01Well, right. Uh which uh describe uh how wrong it is to eat things with blood in it, are an expression of God's horror at predation. Um the Genesis I Genesis account, I take it, isn't history or purported history, but it's a statement of original intention and eventual outcome. It's a statement not that wolves ever survived on tomato is all pain and death. That's not how he intended it to be. Um the Noah story is strange and difficult, isn't it? I mean, the the only food on the ark was was vegetarian food. But the very first thing that humans do when they kill sacrificially some of their human uh to kill sacrificially some of their animal companions and make a burnt offer. Yeah. And and God's response is is very curious. I I I will never again kind uh something like the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth. So he he seems to be saying that until the final redemption, uh human hearts are so warped that they're going to make bad decisions, like killing young animals. Uh and then he he changes dramatically the relationship between man and animals, and between animals and others, in fact. That the fear and dread of you should rest on any every animal of the earth. Yes, yes. But but the remains is a reminder that is in how it's meant to be. So meat eating is allowed, but it's a sort of resigned dispensation. It's not a statement of the way things are meant to be.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, perhaps no black pudding for Christians. Um and yeah, I mean I mean in your in your book, I think you mentioned that you rarely eat meat. Is that in being a human, is that right? Well, I've I've relapsed now.
SPEAKER_01Fallen off the wagon. Umsiastic eater of animals, I'm afraid. Okay. But but but I I agree that not eating animals is uh i i is a and then the original Genesis narrative seriously.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Yeah. Okay, interesting. And what about when you say you've lived amongst animals in um you know being a human and being a beast where you sort of try to live like a a badger, an otter, a fox, and a stag and a swift, is it? Um what what was that experience like and did it radically alter how you have since engaged with uh animal life?
SPEAKER_01Well, uh it it made me feel more of a human. Uh it maybe acknowledge the differences between uh me and the non-human you maybe acknowledge the difference between me and the non-humans I was meeting in the course of these uh elaborate zoological and anthropological thought experiments and method. The research for being a beast in particular helped me to understand my badger and fox and otter and stag and swift relatives better. Um knowing more about my family, my non-human family family a human was, uh and knowing better what a human was, I felt more confident in saying that I was one. So I I felt more than I had before the the burden of that onerous commission that humans uh to to be stewards. Um so I I I hope that I hope that it made me more thoughtful, uh more reflective, uh think twice before I sink my teeth into uh a steak made from the buttocks of a very near relative.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And thinking about uh that whole experience, is it something you would you would recommend to to someone like me? You know, I've I would say I love being outdoors, I love walking and and playing sport, but I don't have uh you know a wealth of experience when it comes to living amongst beasts. You know, I've done some pretty uh low level camping, but do you think I would I would benefit from plunging myself into a wood?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. So depending on how you do the calculation, between eighty And 95% of our time as behaviourally modern humans has been spent as hunter-gatherers. And hunter-gatherers have and have to have in order to survive a very uh intimate, almost clairvoyant relationship with the non-human world. So non-human basically are. That's what we constitutionally are. So anything rema that reminds you of what you constitutionally are is gonna uh make you out of thought.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Well maybe I'll have to have to give it a try. I mean, my um just to go on a tandem and reflect on my own experience. My father-in-law um shoots, if I can, yeah, he shoots uh deer. Uh he does sort of estate management. Um and I do I do feel a difference when I'm eating that venison compared to something I've bought from Tesco or wherever it might be. Um and I think it's a real shame that so many of us have lost that connection to um where our food comes from and to um the natural world in general. So I think any opportunity to engage in that kind of practice um is is fantastic. Um but unfortunately, I mean, I think a lot of people find it maybe a bit sort of bit odd or the you know the um they think that shooting deer is actually more cruel to uh to the animal world than the alternative of sort of factory farming.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's a bizarre thing to say, isn't it? Um so yeah, we should we should try always, if we're going to eat meat, eat meat fr from happy animals. Um and uh wild things are a lot happier than most um farmed animals. Uh if we're gonna eat farmed animals, try to make sure that they have had happy lives. And the other thing is that it's uh a much more intimate, a much more satisfactory relationship between uh the man who looks down his rifle sights at a deer than uh the man who's just looking down his binoculars at the deer. And this is a mysterious thing. It it may be because uh as your finger is poised over the trigger, um you're recognizing a solidarity between you and that you are both mortal creatures. Yeah. Um and you're you're both you're both going to die. You share something really fundamental. Um and that's that's an insight which of course you didn't get your shrimp-wrapped uh bit of uh factory farm meat in in the supermarket. Um and the the business of stalking something in the wild is uh something which again takes you back to what you constitutionally are. Um it rebrokers the the relationship with your hunter-gatherer roots, loss of which of the uh both personal and societal dysfunction that we have. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So what would you say is there a solution to that thorny issue? How can we get back to some kind of relationship on a on a mass societal level? Is that possible?
SPEAKER_01Well we should as a matter of law uh try to insist that farmed animals have lives which are as close to their wild lives as they can. Uh we should try to reduce the uh the suffering of the animals. Uh so one of the big issues these days is that lots of small local abattoirs are being shut down, which means that animals have to be taken often hundreds of miles in order to be killed, which causes uh tremendous suffering. Um we should more fundamentally uh make it a compulsory part of the school curriculum for uh lie face down in a field or in a wood for at least two hours a week. For a pee, yeah. Look, that there are lots of things there are lots of things we could do. We can't um we can't actually live uh exactly as hunter-gatherers did because we have hunted and gathered uh things to the point of extinction. But we can try to try to gather ethos um in our uh mechanized modern lives. Um and one of the things that we can do is something which is uh mentioned uh by David Abraham, the uh American philosopher and naturalist. He says there are only ever relatively unwild places. So a shopping mall, if you walk through it with uh the eyes of a hunting uh will be to you um a wild place. Yeah um at if you leave a banana out in an inner city shopping mall, come back in a couple of days and it'll be covered with a wild wild bacteria and fungi. Reflect reflect on that. Reflect on the fact that um your gut is uh a massive vat of uncontrolled and uncontrollable uh that you therefore are are an ecosystem. Um ref reflections on those sorts of uh basic biological facts can can help us to live as in our centrally heated boxes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And um is that something you've tried to uh encourage your your children to to reflect upon? Because I think you have six children and you mentioned uh Tom came with you on your um sort of upper paleolithic exploration of the the wood. Have all your children tried to sort of dive into that world.
SPEAKER_01Well, I try to encourage them. Uh I fail most of the time. As I fail with myself most of the time. Yeah. We're terribly lazy creatures, aren't we? It's it it's difficult, is it to get up off the sofas or some of the most dangerous places in the in the universe uh and and go out into the work. Uh we forget the good that um being out in the wild world necessary it is for our material and spiritual health in order to do it. So to to do that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, it's uh yeah, we need discipline perhaps, or to someone to force us to do it, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, someone to whip us off the sofa and out and out on a out up a hill. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that would be handy. I don't think it's coming anytime soon. Um let's just change uh tack for a little bit. Um in your in being a human, I noticed quite a you know, you mentioned you're a Greek Orthodox Christian, and there's quite a split that you um perceive between the East and the West in terms of the Eastern and Western churches. Um you know, you say that for the Orthodox God infuses leaves and stoats, um, and you mention that prayer that you said you say every morning, whereas you think that um Western Christianity has committed a mis exegesis of the Genesis mandate to subdue the earth. Is that something that drew you to the Eastern Orthodox Church in the first place, this different relationship with creation?
SPEAKER_01Other things drew me to the Eastern Church, but I I did become fairly early on aware of uh the the the the way that the Eastern Church regards the whole of nature as sacramental, um it's it's an extension really of uh of regarding the Eucharist and the wine as as sacramental. Now these are material things which uh have the ability to transform us. Um and if bread and wine have the ability to transform us, uh if these agricultur if these agricultural products have the ability to transform us, um should we not think that uh trees and badgers and mountains have a corresponding uh ability to transform us? Perhaps not as intense, obviously, because the the uh that the liturgical sacraments are special, but th th those liturgical sacrament sacraments point to uh to a general principle. That the general principle being that matter matters, uh that uh that God inhabits uh and loves and has not given up on creation. Um and that we as material in continuity with the the wider material uh creation um will be better off if uh we feel the porosity we we feel the porosity of the membrane uh which separates us from the from the non-human world.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and something in my own reading of Eastern Orthodoxy that I've really enjoyed uh sort of dipping into is the the tradition of the desert fathers and these these great ascetics who were ri I think really immersed in in the wilderness. And uh having never done it, I can't really uh comment. But I imagine you know that would have such a profound effect on your on your spiritual life. And I think it's so easy to be distracted from um matters of of faith, matters of the spirit when you're in a you know in a post-industrial um revolution uh sort of society and all these technological distractions that we were mentioning earlier. So it is yeah, it's quite a quandary we're in. But you know, you're showing that there are ways we can explore um our connection with creation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um you mentioned you mentioned the Desert Fathers, um and of course, in in the patristic period generally, there was uh a good deal of reflection about the the nature of man and his relationship to the non-human world. I find uh most helpful, this gives back to our discussion earlier about uh the Margot Day, um, is the help they think of Sir Maximus the Confessor, say uh he describes humans uh being in a unique position um in creation. They're both material and spiritual, um, and therefore humans can and must act as mediators between must act as a bridge uh which links them, uh a sort of glue binding them together. Um and and this union of of the realms of matter and spirit has of course been perfectly and definitively by the perfectly and definitively material and the perfectly and definitively spiritual Jesus. Um but but all things, all created things meet in us. Uh Maximus describes us as the magamundi and a microcosm. Um so everything is within us, it's an extraordinary idea. Um so inside the most callous exploit executive is the whole of the natural world that he goes to work to exploit his draw.
SPEAKER_00Um as you were saying, Arduff is an ecosystem, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Right. And one of the reasons what's is wrong in the uh the Judeo-Christian tradition is the reason which is given in the Lex Talianus. Uh, to dis to destroy a human is an offence against the image of God, which is stamped on the human. And Americans are uh an even more extravagant reason not to kill humans. It's not just homicide, but it's coining a word, c cosmicide. It destroys the whole cosmos which is inside um every person. So uh that that human mission, which is entailed in this idea of humans, microcosm and mediator, it's an awesome one. I I I I uh I feel vertiginous just thinking about it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um and it gives us such a dignity that, as you said, you know, in the Kantian notion of dignity is is lost. I think if you completely think that any human being has the cosmos within them, then yeah, reason is not irrelevant, but it's is secondary. Um and that's a very empowering uh understanding of dignity, I think.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um and you mentioned you mentioned Jesus um there and how he is where um all of sort of these different he's the bridge between these different worlds, um, shall we say, that we've been discussing. And would how can we fit the cre the incarnation into this? Sorry, the the fact that God became part of creation in the incarnation, how should that shape our view of the natural world and our own humanity?
SPEAKER_01On example this is St. John of Damascus. He's talking about uh how why it's legitimate to use icons, and he says something like, I don't venerate matter, but I venerate the creator of matter who became a matter who assumed life in the flesh and who through matter worked for my salvation. Um it said already that the the consistent uh Christian position, the cause is the matters. Um there are loads of uh anti-Gnostic tropes in the gospels, aren't there? So uh the the the real battle for this for the early church was uh a battle against the Gnostics who who denigrated the material world. That's what one of the reasons I I'm sure why in some of the you have an affirmation of uh the materiality of Jesus' um resurrection body. You have him eating fish on the on the bee, for example. Uh the incarnate body of Jesus was the incarnate body of the God who is quintessentially dignified, and it follows from that if indeed it doesn't follow from themselves, that that m matter which includes the matter which composes our bodies has dignity, which has enormous importance for the way we treat our bodies and the bodies of others. So a another way of putting it which is a uh that our bodies are temples. It's why Jesus healed bodies, it's why Nedson has long been a Christian vocation. Yeah. Yeah. There's another since you asked me about this, there's another way or philosophical. Um you ask about matter. Um nobody has any one nobody has any real idea what matter is. I mean, uh ask any quantum physicist. Uh I mean I I myself amoc that for lots of reasons um that we sh shouldn't go into here. Matter is a phase of consciousness, you know, just as ice and steam are phases of water. Okay. And the translationality that consciousness entails are the web and the wheel of the cosmos. Um but uh the consciousness of God, as we've already discussed, permeates everything. Um that's the the pantheistic view architectonic consequences for the the the the way that we treat all material things. Um i i in in the redeemed world uh matter is but matter itself is transformed. Uh so that the resurrection body of Jesus is is even more material than ours is. Uh it can walk walk through what it it's as Tom Wright describes it, trans physical. It's it seems infinitely heavier uh than uh than our than our own misty uh et perishable bodies.
SPEAKER_00But but but yeah, but that resurrection that that picture of the of the heavier supermaterial uh resurrection body is is a self uh an affirmation of of the of the the matter that we can Yeah and the same I think in um Revelation with the the the New Jerusalem and it's sort of a a super Were you saying super or supra material?
SPEAKER_01Um I I said super I said super because I I don't think it's super in the sense that it transcends materiality. I think it's super in the sense that it's a uh uh uh a matter on steroids.
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, yeah, okay. So I think even the yeah, this could be the heavenly city does seem like a sort of a city on on steroids. And you um you say that um because you you say cities, you know, given your uh understanding of our hunter-gatherer backgrounds, aren't necessarily the the best places for human beings, but even if a city can be redeemed, then anything can be redeemed. Is that the sort of the conclusion you draw?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Everything can be and everything will be. Yeah. Um the image of self-est cosmic. It's it's a restored creation. Uh that includes all humans, animals, plants, and everything else. Yeah. And so you'd think you go. Well. My favourite comedian uh is Victoria Wood. She has um uh an agony aunt whose name is Kitty. Um and Kitty is asked by uh one of her correspondents, Kitty to which surprise, no. Um and she's right about that, because no one will go to heaven. You know, there's no translation to heaven. Creation is going to be restored right here. Um and in that renewed creation, there were animals and plants and mountains. Uh my view about that is that you know our own identity and happiness abound inextricably and joyfully to our relationships with animals and with the the non-human human world.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that's actually what I was going to ask about is that you you say that um good in brackets, Western Christians had better things to do than look at birds. Their real home was not here, their destiny lay in heaven, and so they better concentrate on getting there. So you think that's a a misguided conception of of heaven and uh God's plan for creation, I take it. Yeah, it it it it denigrates uh world that God has created.
SPEAKER_01Um and uh it's contrary to the old testament and the new testament. Um the whole of creation is going to be redeemed rather than um abandoned. Say I mean I I I don't find it necessary or possible to come to a conclusion about the precise spiritual of the non human world, but it's enough for me to observe with St. Paul that the whole of creation waits an eager longing for the redemption. Um, a redemption that happens because of what Christ has done.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, that uh passage from Romans 8 is um very, very helpful. Yeah, I was just thinking about. I think um David Bentley Hart and other you know orthodox uh think uh I think he thinks that you know dogs and other animals will be in the new new creation, and he thinks it's sort of absurd not to um to believe that.
SPEAKER_01Um yeah, I mean but David David Bentley Hart, um following Sergei Bulgakov uh thinks that the sense of consciousness and um individual identity, which certainly many animals have, indicates that they're spiritual beings. Um I I suspect that's right, but I don't I think it's enough to that. Um as I say, it's it's an it's enough it's enough for me to um agree with that picture in Romans 8. And the being, of course. The discussion f forever, I suppose, in the Christian world about uh whether animals are going to be shut out of the afterlife. Um Martin Luther, when he's asked by um his children if their favourite animal near them to eternity, um, said something like, Well, if if when you get to heaven you want your dog there, um he will be there. Um but then he went on and said, Well, uh given all the other glorious of heaven, well, m many an earnest and past log owner is gonna insist that however glorious heaven is, uh they can't have a dog. Um they're gonna say something like that we're so enmeshed with our pets that not only would heaven is being concealed, but if the pet is excised, um there's not much of the owner left to say. Yeah, I mean I mean the like uh the Philip Pullman, sort of yeah. Uh like Bill's um uh argument to be uh about um universalism, I s I suppose. Um how could we rejoice in with it our beloved uh human friends and relatives are damned? We are so uh we're so inextricably entangled with them that it's it's impossible in personal salvation w without the parts of us which are which are composed of them. Yes. Anyway, so Luther Luther of the um little dog was dying, apparently said to it, Be comforted, little dog. You two in resurrection will have a little golden tail. I like that.
SPEAKER_00Great. Yeah, well, um yeah, perhaps you know, pets are one way that we're still uh very much in touch with the natural world, even if they're somewhat different from uh, as you say, in being a human, the sort of the wolves that they they come from any of our sort of cockapoos and labra doodle-doodles, they're not quite so um wild, but people still are very connected to their to their dogs in particular, um, and that might be a positive. Um do you have pets of your own? Uh I have six fairly feral children.
SPEAKER_01Uh and we have had we we have had lots of the traditional family pets. We're away from um traveling quite a lot, so it wouldn't be fair to have um pets. Uh bees you have in a hive garden. But that that probably doesn't count. It would it would mean that I would say to you, yeah, we've got 50,000 pets.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. No, that that's great. So you do you also have your own honey then? Yeah, yeah. Great. Um I mentioned my father-in-law stalks and my my mother-in-law, who I live with them, that's why I mentioned them today. Uh my mother-in-law keeps bees, so she has a fantastic honey. I think about 12 five, so quite into it. Um, no, it is it is very nice. And yeah, again, you have that connection to to the natural world. Um I wanted to just probably the last thing mention um a funny um passage from from being a human, which I mentioned a lot, but um when you say that Tom is becoming a disciple of the sinister Bear Grylls, um, he talks in Bear Grylls' imperial language about conquest and triumph about the wild as an adversary that has to be tricked or crushed. Um so I take you're not a fan of Bear Grylls. Um his approach to the natural world.
SPEAKER_01Bear grills is a wonderful man, um, and yeah, he's endorsed one of my books, and he's obviously great. Uh he's obviously done uh a lot for uh Christianity. Uh he's a good he's a he's a good amount. But um but the language that he uses quite often clearing a mountain uh is is talk which suggests that the world is a is is is an adversary that has to be tricked or crushed. And and that's and then it's a it's language which in the hands very often of Christians has done terrible things. Um you know some of the worst of the stewardship obligation genesis have come from august figures in Christianity. I'm thinking of the Jesuit um Joseph Rickerby, brute beasts not having understanding cannot have any rights. We have no duties of charity or duties of any kind to the lower animals, as neither to sticks or stones. That's quite strange. It's nasty. Um Augustine, reason is not being given to animals to hand and so by the most just ordinances of the creator, both their life and their death is subject to our use. Um now look, I I'm not I'm not saying that bear grills would uh endorse those things. Of course he wouldn't, but but I think we have to be careful about uh about the way in which we talk about uh about conquest and triumph um and about the the wild as something uh something different from us. One wall is the word environment, because that suggests that uh it it's it's something which which is outside us, um uh different from us. Um whereas in fact uh try to shave by talking about the the vat of microorganisms inside us, um we are we are part of the wild world. Yeah. So let's not be environmental activists. Let's be holistic cosmic activists.
SPEAKER_00Okay, I like that. Cosmic activists. And is it is that just uh to finish, I think, is that um how you would look to the future with uh you know a lot of doom and gloom about the future of creation. You'd you'd like more Christians to be cosmic activists.
SPEAKER_01I would love Christians to shoulder their genesis stewardship responsibilities. I'd like them to realize that we live in a a cosmos which is characterized by relationship, that relationship um entails joyous responsibilities. Um but yes, cosmic activism would be a good self would be a good way to describe uh life 21st century Christians.
SPEAKER_00Great. Well perhaps you're not you're not writing a book called Cosmic Activism, are you?
SPEAKER_01Well that no, I'm not actually, but you've given me the thought.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um fantastic. Well, um I think that's a good good place to to wrap up. Thank you so much, Charles, for for coming on.
SPEAKER_01Oh Tuppy, thank you very much for inviting me. I've enjoyed our conversation very much. But the the the only thing that the only thing that uh it may be helpful to cover again is the the stuff about what to say, but but that might that might make things rather too long, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00I mean I was going to ask, that's a good point. Um if someone were approaching those Genesis creation stories, is there something or are there things that you would like to um say to them to aid their understanding? Because I think they're often you know they're some of the most debated passages in the whole biblical um text. So how how do you read them?
SPEAKER_01Well, the starting point is to realise that we've got two creation accounts in Genesis. You say Genesis 1 gives the cosmic perspective, sixth day, Genesis 2 gives a uh a more local, more anthropocentric account. Man's the first living creature on the scene, he arrives even before the plants, let alone the animals. Um the original intention apparently for the animals to be the companions of man, but they proved inadequate, which is an important observation. And yeah, uh so Eve is fashioned from Adam's rib. And then comes the fool. And that that talking snake is an ordinary created animal, it's not Satan. Um the the the passage says we curse the you among all animals and among all wild animals. I mean it's it's emphasizing the naturalness of the snake. Because obviously natural snakes don't talk. Um and before it was cursed, it practically walked upright because afterwards it's cursed the gopher. Um another thing is that um the physical death, contrary to lots of teaching that you hear, um, wasn't a consequence of the fall of man. Um so God's sentence after the fall wasn't a death sentence, but it was a sense of excel. A tree of life was in the garden. God was concerned that with the knowledge gained from eating the fruit, man might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever. So up until that point, he hadn't been mortal. Um another another thing is that it seems clear enough that pain itself, contrary to what's often said, um, isn't a consequence of the fall. Um as a result of the eating of the proof, childbirth is going to be greater than it otherwise would have been. Um so that the increased particular pain in childbirth after the knowledge increasing fall, um I I think the vast fetal head of behaviourally modern humans, you know, which is proportionally far bigger and harder to deliver than those of non-humans. So if you have lots of knowledge or the potential to give lots of knowledge, your mother uh great pain uh at birth. Yeah. Um so uh it it's obvious, uh just uh geologically, archaeologically, that there was physical death before there was any man around. So I don't need to labour that point. Um I suppose we ought to to mention in this context that um what what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. Um so it it it seems to me that the most consistent reading of the various things that Paul said in various places about that issue is a full um i it's that from which the sacrifice of Christ redeems us. It gives us spiritual bodies like his resurrection body, which is as we've discussed, uh are far more solid than our our current physical bodies. Um so what dies is that that soulish body, um what's raised is is the spiritual body. Um one could go on and on about this. It's important, I think, when one reads these accounts to to realize that in part they're polemical documents. Uh they're intended to contradict the view of the world and the view of deities which were in the ancient Near East, yeah, prevailing in Egyptian religion. So they're they're anti-polytheistic tracts. Um it's worth bearing in mind if if our nature reverence threatens to become a worship of nature or of gods in nature, uh and the the apparent ubiquity of consciousness makes that a danger. Um danger which he which you do see in some green iterations of Christianity. Yeah, there's a straight there's a danger there that we're worshippers of creation. Um yeah, definitely. So the the the the accounts emphasize that there's one God, they are astrological cults of Mesopotamia and Egypt, um, etc. etc. etc. Um and then the the story of uh disobedience in the gen Genesis narrative narrative is linked. Um so the the text of uh Genesis makes two announcements about each of the creative acts. So firstly, God announces that something is gonna happen. So let there be light, the earth put forth rotation. And then there's an announcement that the act has been accomplished, so and there was light, for example. But there are there are lots of discordances um between those two things, which is audible only in Hebrew. Only in the case of light is there a perfect match. Only light does exactly what it's told to do. So we've got the announcement let light be and the response light be. After that, in the Hebrew, you see discordance. So, for example, the earth is told grass, grass, but the earth doesn't. It puts forth grass. And and as the story the the disobedience crescendo, so uh when God asks the waters to bring forth the water animals, it doesn't happen. There's no and it was so.