Contemporary biology presents us with a 3.5 billion year story of life, a story in which there is a great deal of pain, death and extinction of species. For theology, this means an intensification of the old problem of natural evil. This article argues that God does care for individual sparrows. It proposes that we can think of the Spirit of God as being present in love to each creature here and now and of each creature finding redemption in Christ. It explores possible ways of understanding the meaning of redemption for individual sparrows.
Ecotheology
Laudato Si’ offers a profound and in some respects new theology of the natural world. In the analysis offered here, it is proposed that three threads can be discerned in the theology of nature contained in Laudato Si’: first, other creatures have intrinsic value; second, they express and reveal God; third, they form with human beings a sublime communion of creation in God. The article concludes with a brief theological reflection on a theological development of the concept of sublime communion.
The scientific claim that the costs of evolution are built into the process by which life emerges brings a new intensity to the old problem of evil. One partial response is to challenge the idea of an interventionist God who overturns or bypasses the laws of nature in favor of a God who works consistently through nature. Another is a theology of Resurrection that offers hope for the final transformation of the whole creation in Christ. In conversation with Karl Rahner, the author explores a theology of Resurrection that is both noninterventionist and transformative.S UFFERING THAT SPRINGS FROM natural causes, such as the South Asian tsunami of December 26, 2004, has always raised hard questions for Christian theology. In the current dialogue between science and theology, the issue of the suffering of human and nonhuman creatures takes on a new intensity, with science making it clear how predation, competition for survival, death, and extinction are built into the 3.8 billion-year-history of life on Earth. Without creatures drawing energy from their environment, there could be no emergence of life. Without death and the succession of generations, there could be no evolution: there would be no eyes, wings, or human brains. The evolution of life in its abundance and beauty is accompanied by terrible costs to human beings and to other species.The costs are built into the process. They are built into the biology, geology, and the underlying physics of a dynamic, life-bearing planet. The costs of evolution are built into an emergent universe. The awareness of these costs pushes theology to a deeper reflection on the nature of God's action. Theology needs to respond, however inadequately, to the idea that so much that is beautiful and good arises by way of increasing complexity through emergent processes that involve tragic loss. We know, as no gen-DENIS EDWARDS, with a S.
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