Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 176:702 (Apr 2019)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss

BSac 176:702 (April-June 2019) p. 238

Book Reviews

By The Faculty And Staff Of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss

Editor

Creation Care: A Biblical Theology of the Natural World. By Douglas J. Moo and Jonathan A. Moo. Biblical Theology for Life. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018. 256 pp. $24.99.

Douglas Moo, widely known for his work with the NIV translation and his Romans commentary (Eerdmans, 1996; rev. 2018), joins his son Jonathan Moo in coauthoring an eye-opening volume for an evangelical audience. The elder Moo (PhD, University of St. Andrews) is the Kenneth T. Wessner Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College; the younger (PhD, University of Cambridge) is associate professor of New Testament and environmental studies at Whitworth University. While Douglas Moo’s venture into eco-theology appears more recent, Jonathan Moo’s presence in the arena includes serving as a research associate at the Faraday Institute from 2006–2010, publishing many times over, and participating in the Lausanne Consultation on Creation Care in Jamaica in 2012. Both contribute expert knowledge of the New Testament text.

Creation Care arrives as part of Zondervan’s Biblical Theology for Life series, alongside Christopher J. H. Wright’s The Church’s Mission (2010) and Craig Blomberg’s Stewardship (2013). Each book in the series follows a tripartite format: Queuing the Questions, Arriving at Answers, and Reflecting on Relevance.

The Moos define “creation care” as denoting “our ethical responsibilities for the non-human world” (24). Anticipating objections, they add, “Readers will discover that our inquiries about how to care for creation confront us with central questions about God, the world, and ourselves and cannot be separated from the rest of the Christian gospel” (24–25, emphasis added). Chapter 2 unveils their hermeneutic, which they visualize as a traffic roundabout: an inclusive/canonical biblical theology in give-and-take conversation with historical and systematic theology, culture, and science. The authors urge engagement with scientific findings rather than retreat or outright dismissal (41).

In the second section, “Arriving at Answers” (chs. 3–9), the Moos walk through several aspects of Scripture directly intersecting creation care, from the creation mandates in Genesis to Jesus’s resurrection in the Gospels to text critical issues in 2 Peter 3. They begin, however, with a surprising insight from a common thesis. If we are created to care for creation, the paths to this end course through “science, art, and many forms of work we sometimes label ‘secular.’ . . . We need...