The Green Bible... yes, it's true

I have been receiving the brilliant magazine First Things. This month's edition has an absolutely brilliant piece by Wheaton scholar Alan Jacobs reviewing the freshly minted (sorry) Green Bible. Yes, it's true... contemporary piety has even come to the point of producing a Bible with creation passages printed in green. What a relief, says Jacobs, to discover that God is green, because we know that green must be good. Even the ubiquitous NT Wright has penned an essay for this tome.

But Jacobs makes some terrific theological observations, not the least of which involves the issue of continuity/discontinuity.

Some will argue that the Book of Revelation promises the complete destruction of this world and its replacement by 'a new heaven and a new earth'. I am not inclined to that view; I tend to agree with NT Wright that the vision points to a moment when the new creation is made 'not ex nihilo, but ex vetere, not out of nothing, but out of the old one, the existing one,' just as the resurrected body of Jesus is not a brand-new body but his old one glorified.

Even so, we must face the fact that God's interaction with his creation is not always constructive and restorative but is often shockingly destructive. It is true that the destruction always precedes some kind of renewal, but it is destruction all the same, and while we can come up with comforting scenarios in which we do the same kind of thing - controlled burns in forest management and farming, for instance - it would be best not to allegorize too readily. God loves his creation, but he deals with in ways that, to us, are sometimes indistinguishable from hatred. As he deals with us....

A great rejoinder to the environmental ideology which is coming pretty close to idolatrous... (I am no green-sceptic, by the way!)