Peter Leithart and Wendell Berry

Leithart concludes:

Berry is right that the Bible contains no “contempt or hatred for nature,” and he is right that the Bible instructs us to care for a world that is a gift.  Contact with untouched creation is a good as well, but in the biblical story it is not the ultimate good.  There are trees and rivers – clean ones – in the new heavens and new earth, but there are also gates of pearl and streets of gold.  It is, after all, a city.  As our life is in the Last Adam not the first, so our hopes are directed toward the descent of a new Jerusalem not toward a return to old Eden.