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.
