^{Echoes of this view can be found in the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Scriptures and particularly where Job is firmly reminded of his place in the world. The author of the Book of Job puts the following words into the mouth of God:
 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind} 

^{‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.} 

^{‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?} 

^{‘Or who shut in the sea with doors, when it burst forth from the womb; when I made clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?} 

^{‘Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place, that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it? It is changed like clay under the seal, and it is dyed like a garment. From the wicked their light is withheld, and their uplifted arm is broken.} 

^{‘Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.} 

^{‘Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness, that you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home? You know, for you were born then, and the number of your days is great!} 

^{‘Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war? What is the way to the place where the light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth?} 

^{‘Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no man is, on the desert in which there is no man; to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground put forth grass?} 

^{‘Has the rain a father, or who has begotten the drops of dew? From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven? The waters become hard like stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.} 

^{‘Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or can you guide the Bear with its children? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?} 

^{‘Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you send forth lightnings, that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are’? Who has put wisdom in the clouds, or given understanding to the mists? Who can number the clouds by wisdom? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens, when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cleave fast together?} 

^{‘Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert? Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?}

^{‘Do you know when the mountain goats bring forth? Do you observe the calving of the hinds? Can you number the months that they fulfill, and do you know the time when they bring forth, when they crouch, bring forth their offspring, and are delivered of their young? Their young ones become strong, they grow up in the open; they go forth, and do not return to them.} 

^{‘Who has let the wild ass go free? Who has loosed the bonds of the swift ass, to whom I have given the steppe for his home, and the salt land for his dwelling place? He scorns the tumult of the city; he hears not the shouts of the driver. He ranges the mountains as his pasture, and he searches after every green thing.} 

^{‘Is the wild ox willing to serve you? Will he spend the night at your crib? Can you bind him in the furrow with ropes, or will he harrow the valleys after you? Will you depend on him because his strength is great, and will you leave to him your labor? Do you have faith in him that he will return, and bring your grain to your threshing floor?} 

^{‘The wings of the ostrich wave proudly; but are they the pinions and plumage of love? For she leaves her eggs to the earth, and lets them be warmed on the ground, forgetting that a foot may crush them, and that the wild beast may trample them. She deals cruelly with her young, as if they were not hers; though her labor be in vain, yet she has no fear; because God has made her forget wisdom, and given her no share in understanding. When she rouses herself to flee, she laughs at the horse and his rider.} 

^{‘Do you give the horse his might? Do you clothe his neck with strength? Do you make him leap like the locust? His majestic snorting is terrible. He paws in the valley, and exults in his strength; he goes out to meet the weapons. He laughs at fear, and is not dismayed; he does not turn back from the sword. Upon him rattle the quiver, the flashing spear and the javelin. With fierceness and rage he swallows the ground; he cannot stand still at the sound of the trumpet. When the trumpet sounds, he says ‘Aha!’ He smells the battle from afar, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.} 

^{‘Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads his wings toward the south? Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes his nest on high? On the rock he dwells and makes his home in the fastness of the rocky crag. Thence he spies out the prey; his eyes behold it afar off. His young ones suck up blood; and where the slain are, there is he.’}

[Job: 38,39]

^{Job is challenged to answer a relentless barrage of over forty rhetorical questions each of which anticipates a reply in the negative, indicating Job’s powerlessness and ignorance of the natural world. The questions cover a wide range of earthly and astronomical phenomena amounting to a view of the world as diverse and complex but at the same time a coherent whole. Here is a world of sea and land, of light and dark, drought and flood, heat and cold, of life and death, eating and being eaten. Here is both order and chaos, violence and the exercise of power as well as gentleness and constraint. It is a vision of a world which is apparently as it should be. There is no indication of any need of redemption, no vision of a ‘peaceable kingdom’ or need for a new creation. The statement is essentially a eulogy on the natural world as it is, recognising its splendour and its intrinsic worth. Here is no realm in which Job is given the remit to exercise dominion over nature. On the contrary, the questions seem to be specifically aimed at emphasising Job’s insignificance with respect to the natural world. At the same time, Job is urged to ‘Gird up thy loins like a man’ both in this passage and in the following chapter – Job is affirmed in his humanity as a dweller in the world.}     

^{Commenting on the passage from Job, Anne Primavesi writes, ‘God’s call to Job to recognise his ignorance, when responded to in the spirit of scientific inquiry, has certainly increased our knowledge of “the foundation of the earth … of its measurements … of the storehouses of the snow … of when the mountain goats bring forth”. But such knowledge has also taken us, time and time again, to the limits of human understanding.’3 We can now provide detailed answers to many of the individual questions that God poses to Job, but we are only just beginning to understand how the world functions as an integral and interdependent whole. The big difference between then and now is that we realise that the present state of the world is the product of on-going evolutionary processes set in an unimaginably long time scale and resulting in unbelievable levels of complexity and a magnificence of structure and pattern that we can appreciate but do not fully understand.} 

^{We now believe that the universe had its origins in a singular event. The current estimate is that this took place about 13.7 billion years ago. Earth was formed as one of a number of planets orbiting the sun about 4.5 billion years ago. When life emerged on Earth is uncertain but it is probably not much less than 4 billion years ago. Compare these seemingly endless eons of time with the history of humankind. Our species emerged about 250,000 years ago and we have a record of human history extending for only 5-6,000 years. We have to reflect on God’s first challenge to Job, ‘Where were you when I created the world?’ And we have to reflect on the process of creation. In an evolving world the potential for creativity is a universal phenomenon. Modern science shows us that the universe has inherent powers of self-organisation and creativity. As Arthur Peacocke has put it in a recent article, ‘God is the Continuous Creator … God makes things make themselves.’4 The human response has to be to honour this process in all things and especially in the living things of the earth, whose being we share and without which we would not be.} 

^{The Roman Catholic priest Thomas Berry describes a childhood experience of the natural world – his family were moving into a new house on the edge of town:}

^{‘The house, not yet finished, was situated on a slight incline. Down below was a small creek and there across the creek was a meadow. It was an early afternoon in late May when I first wandered down the incline, crossed the creek, and looked out over the scene.} 

^{‘The field was covered with white lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to explain my thinking at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember. It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in a clear sky. It was not something conscious that happened just then. I went on about my life as any young person might do.} 

^{‘Perhaps it was not simply this moment that made such a deep impression upon me. Perhaps it was a sensitivity that was developed throughout my childhood. Yet as the years pass this moment returns to me, and whenever I think about my basic life attitude and the whole trend of my mind and the causes to which I have given my efforts, I seem to come back to this moment and the impact it has had on my feeling for what is real and worthwhile in life.} 

^{‘This early experience, it seems, has become normative for me throughout the entire range of my thinking. Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; whatever opposes this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation as well as in education and religion.’5 [Emphasis added].}

^{Elsewhere Thomas Berry echoes Arthur Peacocke, ‘[the universe] is a reality, functioning from within its own spontaneity. It is so remarkable and so stupendous to come to understand this process. The divine enables the universe to function in this remarkable way. There is a capacity of self-articulation inherent in the universe, and the more we know about that, the clearer it is that we will gain a totally different sense of the universe than we had previously, and a different sense of how the divine functions in relation to the universe.’6}

^{In this light we can reinterpret the passage from Job by taking the words ascribed to God as articulating the reality of the things of the world on behalf of those who cannot do so for themselves in words. At the same time we should listen to the experience of the medieval mystic Miester Eckhardt, ‘Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature – even a caterpillar – I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature.’ We have to listen to God speaking of the natural world and also to the natural world speaking of God. As we listen, we find that the difference between these two modes of listening becomes blurred and finally disappears.} 

^{This leads to a view of the natural world that affirms it in its reality as an inherently creative, self-organising and evolving system. If ‘God makes things make themselves’, our response has to be to acknowledge and honour this, and to let things be themselves. We have to recognise that humans are a part of the natural world, and, with respect to human activities, to see that these impinge and interfere as little as possible with the natural creative and restorative powers of the rest of the natural world.}

^{What we see when we look at the evolutionary story of Earth in the context of things making themselves, is an unfolding. We see, as the story develops, an ever increasing diversity of things coupled with ever more elaborate patterns of relationship between them. The newer manifestations of biological evolution always emerge from, build themselves out of and intimately incorporate the older. The existence of humans is absolutely dependent on the activities of bacteria and all the other emergent layers of living things together with their interactions with each other and with the non-living environment. It can be said that humans shine in the reflected glory of the progress of the biosphere as a whole, but we remain earth-bound creatures. We need to recover the Romantic vision of Earth as the source and context of human existence. And in the words of Anne Primavesi we need to ‘give God room, room to be God of the whole earth system: enchanting and terrible, giver of life and death.’7}

<sup>References
1.  Mission and Public Affairs Council. Sharing God’s Planet, a Christian vision for a sustainable future (Church House Publishing, 2005).
2. Richard Poirier (Ed.) Ralph Waldo Emerson. A Critical Edition of the Major Works (OUP, 1990), p. 53.
3. Anne Primavesi. Making God Laugh (Polebridge Press, 2004), p. 119.
4. Arthur Peacocke. The Disguised Friend – Darwinism & Divinity  (Science and Religion Forum. www.srforum.org/newsite/articles_1.asp
5. Thomas Berry. Befriending the Earth (Twenty-Third Publications, 1991), p. 25.
7. Anne Primavesi. Sacred Gaia (Routledge, 2000), p. 179.</sup>