Recovering Eden

Eden Strategic Planning

Our task in resuscitating the blessed garden of creation is not, firstly, to remove all pain from the world. Sorrow, grief, toil are the new conditions, like moss on all the trees, like mist in the very air. And as much as we should aim to decontaminate the atmosphere of the foul breath of humid fallenness, that is not what it means to recover Eden.Recovering Eden

Neither is our chief aim in returning to paradise the resowing of a literal garden.

As much as we are to care for the creation, to water the trees and not uproot them, to name the animals and not to wholesale eradicate them, creation care is not the top line of Project Eden strategic planning. Extinction and pollution are outward signs of depravity. The world was not given to us to clear-cut. Nor the seas to empty. Nor the sky to bloat with toxic fumes. And yet, even mending each of these failures, we would not thereby bring about the heaven we must be moving toward.

No.

Our object in moving toward a new Eden is not in eliminating sadness or ending animal cruelty, as though tending the leaves and flowers of the world could save its diseased roots!

Our task, as endowed by the Son and abetted by the Spirit, is to recover the image of God. This image, this way of being, this inner light and means of existence, is what it really means for us to go back to Eden.

To heal a broken world, the first thing that needs to be fixed is the humanity that broke it.

We can move in that direction, but only Jesus can redeem the created order from start to finish. It is not something we achieve. It is something Jesus brings.