On the ecological reading of Scripture
Ecological hermeneutics has become an increasingly important field of biblical interpretation. The chief reason for this is that Christians now read Scripture in ecological circumstances substantially different from those known to its original authors. Climate change, biodiversity loss, industrial agriculture, pollution, changing land use and the disruption of ecological systems confront us with questions the biblical writers could not have formulated in modern scientific terms.
Yet Scripture contains sustained and at times profound reflection on land, water, animals, agriculture, human creatureliness, divine ownership and the flourishing, devastation and renewal of the material world. Ecological hermeneutics explores how these ancient texts may enter responsible conversation with contemporary ecological realities.
A plural field
We must not define ecological hermeneutics too narrowly. Recent scholarship treats it less as a single method than as a cross-disciplinary field incorporating ecocriticism, ecofeminism, postcolonial interpretation, animal studies, eco-material approaches and more explicitly theological methods of retrieval and critique. We might say, then, that ecological hermeneutics is the disciplined interpretation of Scripture in conscious awareness of humanity’s embeddedness within the wider creation and in conversation with contemporary ecological knowledge, while remaining attentive to historical context, theological tradition, and the ethical consequences of interpretation.
One influential approach seeks to recover ecological dimensions of Scripture that have often been overlooked. The biblical world, as mediated to us in Scripture, is filled with references to soil, animals, rivers, rainfall, plants, seasons and agricultural dependence. The earth belongs to God. Sabbath traditions limit production and possession. Prophetic literature frequently connects social disorder with devastation of the land. Psalm 104 imagines an intricately interdependent creation, while Romans 8 places the wider creation within a drama of suffering and anticipated liberation. Such readings correct theological traditions in which creation is subordinated to an almost exclusively anthropocentric account of salvation.
One limitation of retrieval is that interpreters may select texts already congenial to contemporary environmental ethics, and construct from them an apparently uncomplicated “biblical view” of ecology. Scripture contains diverse traditions, and contemporary categories such as sustainability, ecosystems and biodiversity are not biblical concepts in their modern scientific senses. Recovery is valuable, but it must not slide into retrojection.
Suspicion and retrieval
A second trajectory emerged through the Earth Bible Project, associated especially with Australian Lutheran scholar Norman Habel. Its ecological reading strategy employed movements of suspicion, identification and retrieval, guided by principles of ecojustice. Instead of assuming that biblical texts are environmentally benign, interpreters ask whether anthropocentric assumptions operate within the text or in the history of its interpretation.
This approach has considerable merit. Genesis 1:28, for example, contains language of human dominion that requires careful historical interpretation while also inviting reflection on how traditions of dominion have functioned in Christian history. Biblical descriptions of land as possession, animals as resources or environmental devastation as divine judgment should not automatically be converted into reassuring ecological messages.
Yet suspicion must also be directed toward contemporary interpreters. If a biblical text is approved only when it conforms to twenty-first-century ecological commitments, the interpreter risks discovering in Scripture precisely what was brought to it in advance. Ecological hermeneutics therefore needs suspicion in both directions: toward inherited anthropocentric readings and toward its own assumptions.
The field has consequently expanded beyond a simple contrast between retrieval and suspicion. Ecofeminist interpretation examines connections among rhetoric concerning land, fertility, women and domination. Postcolonial approaches ask how biblical traditions of land, empire, belonging and possession have functioned in contexts shaped by colonisation. These questions are especially important in Australia, where ecological interpretation occurs within a landscape marked by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander relationships with Country and by the continuing effects of colonisation.
Country, creatureliness and agency
This requires more than incorporating selected Indigenous insights into an otherwise unchanged Western theological framework. Indigenous Christians and communities must be recognised as interpreters in their own right. Ecological hermeneutics should ask not only what knowledge is included but whose voices are authorised to shape the interpretive conversation. At the same time, Indigenous traditions are diverse and should neither be romanticised nor appropriated as convenient confirmation of Christian ecological claims.
Animal studies, posthumanist interpretation and newer materialist approaches have further broadened the field. They ask whether conventional biblical interpretation grants human beings such priority that animals, plants, bodies, landscapes and material objects become merely symbolic backgrounds for human concerns. These approaches can remind Christian theology that humans are creatures before they are managers, dependent upon water, soil, microorganisms, plants, animals and climatic systems they neither created nor fully control. Christian theology need not adopt every philosophical claim associated with posthumanism or new materialism, but it can learn from their critique of unnecessary human exceptionalism while retaining important distinctions among Creator, humanity and other creatures.
The increasing plurality of approaches raises an important question of normativity. If ecological hermeneutics is not governed by one universally accepted method, how can interpretations be evaluated? Several criteria may operate together. A responsible interpretation should be historically plausible, canonically and theologically coherent, empirically responsible when making claims about contemporary ecological realities, attentive to vulnerable communities and the wider creation, and critically aware of the ethical consequences produced by interpretation. These criteria require careful judgment and may sometimes pull in different directions.
The discipline of humility
Ecological hermeneutics should neither declare Scripture to be environmentally innocent nor dismiss it as irredeemably anthropocentric. It should permit both retrieval and criticism while carefully distinguishing between what a biblical text originally addresses and what Christians may responsibly construct from it in new circumstances.
Ecological hermeneutics is not primarily the discovery of environmental teaching hidden within Scripture but a way of reading Scripture more attentively and with ecological sensitivity. It notices aspects of biblical texts that habitual interpretation may ignore: soil, animals, rainfall, vulnerability, place, physical limits and relationships of dependence. It also asks difficult questions concerning possession, domination and anthropocentrism. Its credibility ultimately depends upon refusing to make Scripture say more than Scripture says.
That conclusion leads naturally to a central methodological question: if Scripture and contemporary ecological science arise from quite different intellectual worlds, how should they be brought into conversation without collapsing one into the other? Part 2 of this series explores this question.
Rev Dr Rod Benson is General Secretary of the NSW Ecumenical Council and a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia serving at North Rocks Community Church in Sydney.
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