Chapter 7: In the Space of the Earth, What Is the Earth?

The Gaia Theory

The astro-sciences have shown the interactions between the inhabited and the uninhabited parts of the planet. This has given rise to the idea that the biosphere of the earth together with the atmosphere, the oceans and the land areas constitute a related, complex system, which can also be grasped as being comparable with a unique ‘organism’, for it possesses the capacity to preserve this planet as a place suited for life. Through the continual absorption of solar energy, life is developed and sustained in a process of photosynthesis. This is James E. Lovelock’s much discussed theory.[1] He really wanted to call the earth system so described as a ‘universal biocybernetic system with a trend towards homeostasis’; but his neighbour, the writer William Golding, offered him the old Greek name for the earth goddess, Gaia. We understand our planet to be a feedback system seeking to create the best possible environmental conditions for the living things existing in it. We call the sustaining of relatively constant life-furthering conditions by means of active controls ‘homeostasis’. In this way the theory came to be known as the Gaia hypothesis, and now, in its expanded form, the Gaia theory. This does not mean a remysticizing of the earth, let alone its deification, as conservative Christians fear.[2] But what it does do is to understand the earth not merely as a living space for many types of life, but as being itself ‘living’ and fruitful.

As Lovelock himself says, the Gaia theory offers an alternative to the modern view according to which nature presents only matter and forces, which have to be mastered and exploited. Gaia is neither blind nor dumb. The theory also offers an alternative to the depressing idea that the planet earth is a mindless spaceship which circles round the sun without meaning and purpose and will do so until one day it burns up or grows cold. Not least, the Gaia theory offers an alternative to the modern anthropocentrism, which perceives the earth only as the environment for human beings, and is conducive to thinking that what is human is orientated towards the earth.

The geosystem within which the human race exists together with other living things works like a planetary organism which develops complex forms of life from macromolecules and cells, and is in a position to keep them alive. There is a certain security system by means of which genetic combinations hostile to life are eliminated. There is a kind of Gaia language. The genetic code is used communicatively by all living things. In the course of millions of years, the world of the living on earth has accumulated a ‘memory in nature’, Gaia is awakening in us human beings and becomes conscious of itself in us.

Just as every cell is part of an organ, and organs are part of a body, in the same way the living things which Gaia brings forth are parts of the ecosystems in which they live and which live from them. We are right when we say that ‘The whole is more than the sum of the parts’, for in each case the whole is a new organization principle and hence different in quality from the individual parts, and these, again, will be changed when they are integrated into new wholes. In the world of life on earth, we can observe the build-up of ever more complex wholes, and can perceive in this a tendency of the planetary organism and a future for the earth.

Talking about human beings and their endowment with consciousness and reason, Lovelock says that Gaia must share with us our astonishment and pleasure, our capacity to think and to speculate, and our restless curiosity.[3] By this he means that Gaia is awakened by us human beings and becomes conscious of itself. But that is the old anthropocentric idea that human beings are the centre of creation.[4] At the same time, however, he prophesies that the earth will survive. But this ‘optimistic’ ecology suggested by the title of his book does not say that humanity will survive too.

The significance of the Gaia theory for the interpretation of the world, and hence for ecological ethics too, can hardly be overestimated:

1. It makes it possible to perceive the local and regional ecosystems in their global functions and not merely to relate them to the human life within them. Ecology is not an extension of the human world.

2. It turns the previous methods of the natural sciences upside down. The increasingly detailed knowledge of specialists is replaced by the co-operation between different sciences and their integration into geosciences. Natural sciences and the humanities become interlaced when it is a matter of investigating human connections with the organism of the earth.

3. Integrating knowledge is no less scientific than isolating detailed knowledge. Knowledge about the parts must rather be taken up and absorbed into our view of the whole. In the final analysis integrating knowledge is not a dominating knowledge that follows the method of divide et impera, ‘divide and rule’; it springs from concern for the life we share and for our survival.

4. The Gaia theory forces us to break away from the anthropocentric self-understanding of modern men and women and their self-centred attitude towards nature. It serves what Lovelock describes as the democratic incorporation of the human race into the life of the geosystem as a whole.[5] Of course the earth cannot be viewed in isolation either. As a planet, it is part of the solar system, and the solar system is part of a greater galaxy, and so forth. For that reason, in the creed the Church Fathers already translated the Bible’s ‘heaven and earth’ into ‘things visible and invisible’.

5. The threatening nuclear catastrophe has taught us, following Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, to see that national foreign policy has to be grasped as part of a shared ‘global home policy’ and that political structures have to be constructed for the world-wide community of humanity. The threatening ecological catastrophe forces us to understand that the shared ‘global home policies’ which emerge are really ‘earth policies’, as Ernst von Weizsächer rightly concluded.[6] Today we are pursuing ‘global’ politics—world politics—without understanding our ‘world’ as ‘earth’, for what we mean is only the human world. We are pursuing globalized economics without paying any regard to the geosystem which has to bear the burden and the cost of these economics. We laud ‘globalization’ but where does that leave the globe? How much say in it do we allow the earth—or in other words the ecosystem, of which is the human world is a part, and on whose welfare we all depend? When shall we understand the human race as being one form of life on earth among many others, and as living together with these other forms?

 

Biblical Perspectives

As the first creation account already shows, in biblical language the earth is mentioned in two relationships: (a) heaven and earth, and (b) earth, sea and air.

‘Heaven and earth’ is the phrase used for the double form of the created world, for ‘all things visible and invisible’, as the Nicene Creed puts it.[7] Heaven is the term used for the sides of creation open to God; that is why ‘the heavens’ are conceived as a pluriverse, whereas ‘the earth’ is always named only in the singular: it is a universe. Although even the multiplicity of heavens cannot contain the infinite God, since they are finite creations, they are none the less imagined as God’s dwelling place. ‘Heaven is my throne, and earth my footstool. What house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest?’ That is what we read in Acts 7.49, as a quotation from Isaiah 66:1. The general view is that heaven and earth have been created in order to provide a dwelling place for the creatively living God. To put it without images, this is the theocentric view of creation which is in contradiction to modern anthropocentricism. It is not the human being who is ‘the crown of creation’; God’s Sabbath is the crown with which human beings are blessed, together with all other created beings. In that God already dwells there, heaven is the world which corresponds to God; the earth is the world that is in contradiction to God in that evil and death, and therefore the annihilation of what has been created, wreak their havoc there. That is why we pray that everything that is divine may come about ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. The biblical hopes for the future are aligned towards heaven on earth, so that the sorely tried earth too may become the world that corresponds to God. This ‘faithfulness to the earth’ distinguishes the belief of Israel and Christianity from the Gnostic religion of redemption, where a yearning for the beyond goes together with contempt for the earth.

 

The Fruitful Earth

In its creation account, the Priestly Code uses the phrase ‘earth, sea and air’ to describe the living spaces for the living things which are going to exist in them.[8] It is ancient wisdom that the living spaces are created first of all, before there is any mention of living beings. For these living spaces themselves are not empty and passive; they are fertile, energy-laden and productive. According to Gen. 1.20: ‘And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures” . . . So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm.’ The ‘waters’ and the sea creatures are linked by this energizing excitement. Gen. 1:24, 25: ‘And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures. . . . And God made the beasts of the earth.’ Here the earth (erez) is granted the ‘vital power to bring forth’ together with which God ‘makes’ the animals. No other created thing is granted a creative power such as this. The earth possesses the energy for the evolution of life. Darwin was right. It is true that according to verse 25 God also ‘made’ the species, ‘according to their kinds’. But that is not a biblical objection to Darwin’s evolution theory, for ‘kinds’ means the evolutionary leaps to new forms of life, not unalterable orders of creation.

 

God’s Covenant with the Earth

According to the Priestly Code, after the ecological catastrophe of the Flood God makes a covenant of life with the survivors: ‘With you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you’ (Gen. 9.9–10). This covenant is incorporated in the wider covenant with the earth: ‘I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth’ (Gen. 9.13). God’s covenant with the earth is not made via human beings, but puts the earth itself into a direct relationship to God. The ‘bow’, often and beautifully depicted as a rainbow, is a recollecting sign for God, not for human beings. For human beings, the knowledge that God has made a covenant with the earth means that its divine mystery has to be respected, and that its divine covenant-rights have to be preserved. These rights of the earth find expression in the Israelite Sabbath laws.

 

The Sabbath of the Earth

According to the Old Testament, the Sabbath of the earth is part of God’s ecology. Modern men and women are aware of the earth and their own bodies preeminently in the framework of their concern with work and consumption.[9] They see only the instrumental side of their bodiliness, and only the utilitarian side of nature. But there is an ancient and simple Jewish wisdom as a way of understanding nature and ourselves as God’s creation, and that is the celebration of the Sabbath, the day when men and women, their children, their servants, their animals, and the strangers among them too, come to rest and are intended to extol the wonder of their existence.[10] They are not just supposed to come to rest themselves, but to leave nature in peace as well. They are supposed to forget purpose and utility. Then they will know themselves just as they have been created to be, and will see nature as it exists simply for its own sake. The power for regeneration is to be found in this resting and ‘leaving in peace’.

The commandment about the sabbath year, or year of jubilee, is focused on the earth, because it is fruitful, and is meant to remain productive. ‘In the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath to the Lord’, says Leviticus 25.4. For this Exodus 23.11 provides a social reason—‘that the poor of your people may eat’—and Leviticus 25.4 an ecological one—‘there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land.’ According to the book of Leviticus 25, the Sabbath rest for the earth is of the greatest importance. All God’s blessings are given to the obedient, but God will punish those who are disobedient. Leviticus 26.33–34: ‘And I will scatter you among the nations, … and your land shall be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste. . . . Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbaths.’ This is a remarkable ecological interpretation of the Israel’s Babylonian exile: God is going to save his land which has been so much exploited by his people that it threatens to become infertile. When God’s land has recovered and has celebrated the Sabbaths withheld from it, the people can return—after ‘seventy years’ (Jer. 25.12).

All agricultural civilizations in the ancient world were familiar with the fallowing principle, as a way of preserving the soil’s fertility. It was only the great empires which exploited their fertile regions without interruption, in order to feed their great cities and their armies, until the ground became a desert. Today too, this is the way most ecological conflicts arise between non-indigenous agrarian concerns and foreign powers, and the indigenous and native population. The people who live on the land and with the land must be given their right to provide for themselves before they produce for the world market. They have a right to nutritional sovereignty. It is only then that the fertility of the earth will also be safeguarded, and without that, humanity will disappear from the ravaged earth in the foreseeable future, just as Israel once did from God’s land.

 

The Spirit of the Earth

The spirit of the earth is creative vital energy for everything that lives in it. When God’s Spirit is ‘poured out’, it is poured out ‘on all flesh’—that being the Hebrew expression for ‘all the living’—so that ‘all flesh’ may become eternally living. But according to Isaiah 32.15–18, the Spirit is ‘poured out’ ‘from on high’ on the deserts and the fields too. Then ‘the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, and the fruitful field is deemed a forest. Then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field. And the effect of righteousness will be peace’. The ‘Spirit from on high’ will bring life to the earth. Everything that was benumbed will blossom, as it does in the spring. What the Romantics called ‘frozen nature’ will burst forth and the deserts, spread through human mismanagement, will become paradisal gardens. That is the resurrection of nature.[11] This is not a romantic wonder-world, but a realistic matter of right and justice.

When God comes, he will come ‘to judge the earth’. The ‘the sun of righteousness’ will rise. It will lift up whatever has wilted and faded, and will awaken whatever is laid low.[12] With this righteousness and justice, God’s judgment is not a punitive tribunal; it is the healing, rectifying, fruitful joy of the earth, a judgment that raises up: for the nations it means his truth—for the earth, his righteousness and justice. The expectation of God’s coming is all-embracing and earthly. God comes with his righteousness to his earth and to all his earthly created beings, and that includes the nations too; but it does not apply preeminently to them but to the ‘kingdom of the earth’ in which they live. Perhaps in his solicitude for the earth God’ concern is not human beings, but with human beings he is concerned about his beloved earth. The prayer ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ does really and truly mean the earth, and the peace of the Christmas message really and truly means the ‘peace of the earth’. In the book of Isaiah, the earth is even ascribed a salvific efficacy:

 

Shower, O heavens, from above,

and let the skies rain down righteousness;

let the earth open, that salvation may sprout forth,

and let it cause righteousness to spring up also;

I the Lord have created it (Isa. 45.8).

 

In Isaiah 4.2 the messiah is even called ‘a fruit of the earth’. This salvific mystery of the earth also finds expression in a German Christmas carol which calls on the Saviour to ‘spring from the earth’. The earth is not only the mother of all the living; in this perspective it is also ‘the womb of God’, that is to say the mother of the Saviour and of salvation. On Orthodox icons the birth of Jesus is depicted not in a human stable but in a natural cave in the earth.

 

The Splendor of the Earth

According to Old Testament ideas, God has evidently a special relationship to the earth. The creation story (Gen. 1.31) says that ‘God saw everything that he had made’ and found that it was ‘very good’. God’s pleasure is expressed in the ‘shining face’ he turns towards his creation. That their existence is rooted in ‘the pleasure’ of the creator is part of the joy in living of created things. In this pleasure, everything created senses that it is blessed. ‘When thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created; and thou renewest the face of the ground’ (Ps. 104.30).

All created beings are forms taken by God’s creative Spirit. In the light of the creator’s shining face, the whole earth with everything created comes to shine. The image used is the springtime sunrise: ‘You are clothed with honor and majesty, wrapped in light as with a garment’ (Ps. 104.1a–2).

‘The Lord by wisdom founded the earth’ (Prov. 3.19), so it will endure. The divine wisdom that shapes it can be perceived from the surviving existence of the earth and its interrelations. That is why the earth is ‘full of the knowledge of the Lord’ (Isa. 11.9). The foundation always given for this knowledge is that ‘the heavens ‘are glad’ and that the earth ‘rejoices’ (1 Chron. 16.31; Isa. 49.13).

Just as in the beginning God takes pleasure in what he has created, and just as in the present the earth is full of the wisdom and knowledge of God, in the same way, in the ultimate future toward which everything draws ‘the glory of God’ will fill all the earth (Isa. 6.3). This is the conception of the future in which the creator himself will come so as to ‘dwell’ in his creation, and to fill everything with his eternal livingness.[13] ‘God is coming’: that testifies to the pleasure, the wisdom and the knowledge of God already filling the earth. This idea is portrayed in the image of the temple which the whole universe—heaven and earth—is to become. The ground of all being does not remain transcendent over against everything that exists, but enters into everything that is, becoming immanent in it. This cosmic hope is so bold that it can be viewed as a counter-image to the ‘Big Bang’ from which the universe has proceeded.

In the New Testament, this eschatology of the earth is carried further. Everything has been created through Christ, the Word and the wisdom of God. His death resembles the grain of wheat which falls into the earth in order to bring forth much fruit. Through Christ’s resurrection, God ‘reconciles to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven’ (Col. 1.20). This reconciliation of the ‘universe’ anticipates the future of the universe’s glorification depicted in the image of ‘a new heaven and a new earth‘ (Rev. 21; 2 Peter 3.13). With this, the cosmic Christ will become the redeemer of the earth as well. The earth goes to meet a glory far surpassing the glory of its origin. It will be ready to receive God himself and to become his eternal dwelling place.

The Christian spirituality of the earth has always had a special relationship to the kingdom of glory. It is not a kingdom of grace already fulfilling the expectations of the earth; that will be so only in the kingdom of the glory of the indwelling creator. For John Calvin, God has revealed himself ‘in the whole edifice of the world, and thus still reveals himself today, so that men and women cannot open their eyes without necessarily descrying it. His Being is indeed incomprehensible, so that his Godhead is unattainable to all human understanding. But on each of his works he has put the evidential stamp of his glory … Wherever we turn our eyes, there is around us no particle of the world in which at least some spark of his glory cannot be seen.’  ‘But’, laments Calvin, ‘all the flaming torches in the building of the world, provided for the glorification of the creator, shine for us in vain. From every side they flood us with their light, but we lack the eyes to see them, we are blind.’[14]

In this respect natural theology is an anticipated theologia gloriae, a theology of glory. It attempts to decipher and interpret ‘the signs of his glory’ in the forms and processes of nature. How is that possible? The immanence of the transcendent God brings all created things to their self-transcendence. Consequently, we can interpret the self-transcendence of all natural forms and processes as signs of the future of the coming God. ‘The book of nature’, together with the ‘book of the promises’, points toward the universal kingdom of glory.

The ‘splendour of the earth’ is the beauty of its natural forms and processes, and what Paul Tillich calls its ‘dreaming innocence’. It points towards the beauty of the creator.

 

What Future Does the Earth Have?

If we go along with scientific predictions, the end of the earth is foreseeable. When the solar system collapses, the earth will burn up or grow cold, but the human race will already have died out millions of years before that, because the earth will have become uninhabitable. According to the prophetic promises of the Bible, a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth, will take the place of this present world:

 

For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth;

and the former things shall not be remembered

or come into mind.

But be glad and rejoice for ever

in that which I create (Isa. 65. 17–18).

 

What distinguishes the new earth from the old one? It is the righteousness which will enduringly dwell there. Even if the heavens pass away and the earth burns up, this hope endures:

 

According to his promise

we wait for new heavens and a new earth

in which righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3.13).

 

For this hope is founded on God’s faithfulness to his creative resolve, which no chaos and no annihilating power can make him set aside. God will shape the future of the earth ‘according to his promise’. That is why the book of Revelation ends with the vision of ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ (Rev. 21.1). What is new about them, compared with creation ‘in the beginning’? ‘God will dwell with them and they shall be his people.’ It is God’s Shekinah which will make the heavens and the earth new. By virtue of the indwelling of the eternal and living God, heaven and earth and all created being will become eternally living. The new creation will be an eternal creation: ‘world without end.’

 

“Brothers, Remain True to the Earth”

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra:[15] ‘I implore you, my brothers, remain true to the earth and do not believe those who talk to you about celestial hopes! They are poison peddlers . . . despisers of life . . . ! Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy . . . to blaspheme against the earth is now the most frightful thing.’

In modern German theology it was really only the German pietist theologian Christoph Blumhardt and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who made the earth the subject of theological thinking. Both understood the kingdom of God as the ‘kingdom of resurrection on earth’, and brought the realism of bodiliness and faithfulness to the earth into Protestant theology, which was generally speaking idealistic and individualistic. Blumhardt wrote: ‘The goal was an earthly one first of all, not as we Christians think a heavenly one but a heavenly one on earth . . . so that on earth God’s name may be sanctified, so that on earth God’s kingdom may exist, and so that on earth his will may be done …The earth is the stage of God’s kingdom . . . for the kingdom of God stands in direct relationship to the earth, it lives now with the earth.’[16] ‘Nature is the womb of God. It is out of the earth that God will come to meet us.’[17] Contrary to the neo-pietistic slogan ‘salvation alone’, with its reduction of salvation to the salvation of the soul, the Blumhardt movement in Möttlingen and Bad Böll put Jesus’ saying: ‘Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.’ This movement began in the Black Forest village of Möttlingen with healings of the sick, and in 1899 Christoph Blumhardt the younger joined the Social Democratic party in order to stand beside ‘the heavy laden’ and the people who had been deprived of their rights. The church thereupon excluded him from its pastorate.

In 1932 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then curate in Barcelona, held a lecture under the heading ‘Thy kingdom come’, and followed Blumhardt: ‘Only the person who loves the earth and God in one can believe in the kingdom of God.’ Christ . . . does not lead people to a flight from the world into worlds behind the world; he gives the earth back to them as their faithful sons.’ ‘In the hour in which the church prays for the kingdom today, it pledges itself to faithfulness to the earth, to misery, to hunger, to dying.’ Bonhoeffer saw the reason for this faithfulness to the earth in the resurrection of Christ: ‘Here the law of death is shattered; here the kingdom of God itself comes to us, in our world.’[18] Whereas Christoph Blumhardt spoke out against the neo-pietistic individualist interpretation of salvation, Bonhoeffer protested against the liberal distortion of Christianity into a gnostic ‘religion of redemption’. Both found their way into the biblical realism of the earth when they turned to the message of the Old Testament: ‘Does the question of saving one’s soul ever come up in the Old Testament? Isn’t God’s righteousness and kingdom on earth the center of everything?’ asked Bonhoeffer when he was in prison.[19] Writing to Maria von Wedemeyer about their engagement, he wrote: ‘May God give us [faith] daily. I don’t mean the faith which flees the world but the one that endures in the world and which loves and remains true to the earth in spite of all the suffering which it contains for us. Our marriage is to be a Yes to God’s earth, it is to strengthen our courage to do and accomplish something on earth.’[20] Bonhoeffer professed this Yes to the earth at the time when he was facing death because of his resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, at the time, 1944, when German cities had been razed to the ground, and the blood of the murdered Jews cried out to high heaven.

The important thing today is to live this faithfulness to the earth in the crises in which the manmade catastrophes to the earth are being heralded. The important thing is to prove this faithfulness in the face of the indifference and cynicism with which many people knowingly accept the destruction of the earth’s organism and foster ecological death.


1. James E. Lovelock, Gaia—A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford, 1979); Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (New York: Norton, 1966, Revised Edition, 1995): See here Elisabet Sahtouris, Gaia: Vergangenheit und Zukunft der Erde, foreword by James Lovelock (Frankfurt: Insel, 1993). ↵

2. Christianity Today, 11 January 1993: ‘Saving Our World? How Christian Is the Green Agenda? Is the Earth Alive?’ ↵

3. Lovelock, Ages of Gaia. ↵

4. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486). ↵

5. See Lovelock, Ages of Gaia. ↵

6. Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Erdpolitik. Ökologische Realpolitik an der Schwelle zum Jahrhundert der Umwelt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche, 1991). ↵

7. Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993, and London: SCM Press, 1985), 158–84. ↵

8. Bernd Janowski, Die Welt als Schöpfung: Beiträge zur Theologie des Alten Testaments 4 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 2008); Michael Welker, Creation and Reality, trans. J. F. Hoffmeyer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999). ↵

9. That is why Sigmund Freud defined health as the capacity for work and for enjoyment. ↵

10. Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation, 276–96; Jürgen Moltmann, God for a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 1999), 113–16. ↵

11. Jürgen Moltmann, Sun of Righteousnes, Arise! God’s Future for Humanity and the Earth, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press and London: SCM Press, 2010), 67–74. ↵

12. Ibid., 127–48. That is the Babylonian concept of the judging, rectifying and healing divine righteousness, which is taken up in the Old Testament and understood in a new way. ↵

13. This is emphatically stressed by Hans-Joachim Kraus, Systematische Theologie im Kontext biblischer Geschichte und Eschatologie (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1983), 131–336. It is also emphasized in Celtic spirituality. See J. Philip Newell, ‘God was celebrated as the life within all life. Creation was seen as the dwelling place of God’, The Book of Creation: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 1999), xxii. ↵

14. John Calvin, Institutio, I, 5, 1. The reason for this, according to Calvin, lies in the creation in the Spirit of God. Spiritus Sanctus enim est, qui ubique diffusus omnia sustinet, vegetat et vivificat (Institutio I, 5, 14). If the whole creation is the work of the Spirit, then it is full of signs of the coming God and his glory. ↵

15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra I.3, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 4 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993), 15. See also Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Das Reich Gottes und die Treue zur Erde,’ Das Gespräch 49 (Wuppertal: Jugenddienst, 1963). ↵

16. Leonhard Ragaz, ‘Der Kampf um das Reich Gottes’ in Blumhardt, Vater und Sohn– und weiter (Zurich and Leipzig: Rotapfel, 1922), 60. ↵

17. Johannes Harder, ed., Christoph Blumhardt: Ansprachen, Predigten, Reden, Briefe 1865-1917, III, (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1978), 295. ↵

18. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Dein Reich komme: Das Gebet der Gemeinde um Gottes Reich auf Erden’, (Hamburg: Furche, 1957), 8–9. ↵

19. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 8, ed. John W. DeGruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 372. ↵

20. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (London: SCM Press, 1971), 415 (trans. altered). See also Ruth-Alice von Bismarck and Ulrich Kabitz, eds, Love Letters from Cell 92: The Correspondence between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maria von Wedemeyer, 1943–45, trans. John Brownjohn (London: Harpercollins, 1994). ↵