Joining Creation's Praise: A Theological Ethic of Creatureliness

For several decades now academic Christian ethics has been focused on hard questions and single topics. This book is the first major work in recent decades to show how the different questions and topics in Christian ethics are all connected by the theme of creatureliness. We are bodies and live in a material world. This world claims our action. The theological question is: How? Joining Creation’s Praise shows why taking creation seriously need not fall into natural theology nor the fideistic appeal to scripture against science. We are creatures who were made to be gardeners, a starting point to God’s story with human beings which has crucial contemporary relevance for questions of how we eat, how we procreate, what we think is justice and how we think ideas like home, church, and family.

This book follows the first few chapters of Genesis to discover the questions it puts to us, and also the way these questions each lead us back to the living working of the Creator. What is relevant for the Christian life is not a work God did some time in the past, but recognizing a Creator who remains very much engaged with creatures. It matters that this God not only created but recreates and redeems creatures who cry out in need. To have been redeemed therefore makes a difference to how we think about owning other creatures, how we approach manipulating them and joining ourselves to them. The book is unified by a quest to find a more dialogical mode of living as a creature, one in which our differences from other creatures can be taken seriously and valued.