ONE of the most celebrated encounters with the natural world in Sir David Attenborough’s long career was in his TV series Life on Earth in 1979, when he was accepted into a group of mountain gorillas in Rwanda. The film of him, lying relaxed as one of the family, said more than a million words could have done about our kinship with the apes and our evolution from them as humans. We are, indeed, human apes, in spite of the fundamentalists, mostly in America, who still sing variations on the theme of “I’m no kin to a monkey — no, no, no.”
Almost a decade before Sir David’s encounter with the Rwandan gorillas, John Austin Baker, later to be Bishop of Salisbury, wrote a remarkable book of Christian apologetic, titled, after 1 Corinthians 1.25, The Foolishness of God. It was a well-composed argument for the view that our universe could be properly understood only as the creation of divine sacrificial love. He warned how easy it had become for the Church to ignore this, and to take refuge in an aggressive and judgemental one-upmanship, empasising divine retribution rather than mercy.
Baker wrote lyrically about the natural world, about the pleasure that he believed animals displayed in their searching for and finding food, companionship, and sex. He considered how the random variations produced by natural selection had provided a wondrous variety of life forms, which testified to the Creator’s generosity in ways far greater than that of any kind of meticulous planning could have done. Perhaps he would have understood why Sir David could be so relaxed among the mountain gorillas. Our kinship with animals is part of our humanity, even though, as part of the natural cycle of life, we compete with many of them, kill some of them, and even eat them. Yet the love of God runs through nature, and we experience it as grace expressed in symbol and sacrament.
The Foolishness of God was a tour de force — one of the most exciting and persuasive essays in Christian apologetics that I have ever read. It anticipated the creation theology of writers such as Matthew Fox but went far beyond their efforts in its scope and originality.
Baker urged us not to fall into the traps of either sentimentalising or deifying nature, but, rather, to see it as the outpouring of one whose ultimate creativity is displayed in the cross of Christ. Suffering stirs our compassion, but can also be the mechanism of change and growth. This makes sense of what nature shows us.
The Foolishness of God is a very Anglican work. It reflects the experience of the many parson-naturalists who have prayed the Benedicite and rejoiced in the changing seasons and the English countryside. If you celebrated Sir David’s birthday last weekend, you might like to enhance the pleasure by reading (or re-reading) The Foolishness of God.