Where God meets the Earth: rethinking Christianity’s nature problem 

God and world against each other? 

Christian’s journey into this contested territory began more than a decade ago, in 2012, when he found himself reading through a wave of Indian writing on what was called “Vedic Science.” The movement claimed that the insights of modern science—physics, cosmology, consciousness studies—already existed in Hindu religious tradition. For Christian, who grew up immersed in the intersection of Indian culture and Christian faith, the fascination lay not so much in the scientific claims as in the theological polemics that accompanied them. 

“In this,” he recalls, “there was a lot of criticism of the Christian worldview,” particularly the accusation that Western Christianity sees God as fundamentally detached from the natural world. Critics argued that Christians imagine a deity “far away from nature… coming in from outside and going back,” as if God were a cosmic engineer who intervenes occasionally but otherwise keeps his distance. 

This charge lodged itself in Christian’s mind. Was Christianity really shaped by a dualism in which “God and the material world are against each other”? Had Western theology, influenced by centuries of Greek philosophical categories, distorted the faith’s original imagination of the God–world relationship? These questions formed the beginning of a long intellectual journey that would take him through postcolonial theory, liberation theology, and ultimately the depths of trinitarian thought. 

A theologian not looking in from the outside 

It matters that Christian speaks from within. Raised in India and shaped by its religious diversity, he is not an outsider observing Hinduism, postcolonialism or Dalit politics from above. He is speaking as someone who understands the lived reality of a religiously plural, socially stratified, environmentally vulnerable society—one where questions about God and nature have immediate political consequences. 

His first window into the debate came from India’s cultural landscape itself. In Hindu philosophy and especially in contemporary “holistic” movements, the divine and the natural world are often seen as deeply fused: “Hinduism sees God as the ocean and us as the waves,” he says. But Christian began to notice that this vision, attractive as it seemed, raised new problems. “God and nature are not distinct,” he explains. “And therefore God looks like a magician. What happens to the human experience of evil?” 

If everything is divine, he wondered, what becomes of justice, ethics, and responsibility? How do we value the material world if it is only a temporary illusion? What happens to the lived reality of suffering? 

At the same time, he was noticing something else: the critique of Christianity from Indian thinkers echoed a complaint that had long existed within Western theology itself. “I came across many Christian theologians who said modern Christian theology is influenced by Greek dualism,” he says. The idea that Christianity promotes a sharp split between spirit and matter was not just an argument made from outside the faith, “but from the Christian world itself.” 

This, for Christian, was a turning point. The problem was not the critics. The problem was that Christian theology itself had—for long stretches of its history—forgotten its own resources. 

A world divided, or a world held together? 

Dualism, Christian argues, has been a persistent shadow in Western thought, a legacy of Plato and other Greek philosophers who separated the spiritual realm from the physical. Much of his critique here builds explicitly on the analysis of Colin Ewart Gunton, the influential English Reformed systematic theologian, whose work convinced Christian that Greek metaphysics left a deep imprint on Christian language. Even though Christian theology sometimes resisted dualism—in the 4th and 12th centuries, for instance—it kept finding its way back into theological thinking, largely because of the conceptual and linguistic tools theologians inherited. 

This point will resurface later: if language is the problem, new language may be part of the solution. 

Dualism frames the world as a battleground between higher and lower realities, spirit and matter, God and Earth. And it is this mindset, Christian believes, that many modern critics are reacting to—environmental activists who fear Christianity justifies exploitation of nature; postcolonial theorists who see in Christian thought an analogy for domination; and even well-meaning ecotheologians looking for a more holistic spirituality. 

The problem, he argues, is that the alternatives on offer often create new difficulties. Monism and pantheism—where “God and world are indistinguishable”—collapse the distinction between creator and creation. Panentheism, which depicts the world as residing within God (as a child within the womb of the mother), comes closer. But it still fails to address the problem of evil. “If God is so closely connected to the world, does not God also somehow become sinful?” 

And that cannot be right, he insists, because “the biblical data does not suggest God is sinful.” 

His concern is not theoretical. It is pastoral and ethical. A God who is wrapped so tightly into the world’s suffering that God shares its flaws cannot offer liberation from them. 

Christian’s search led him elsewhere—to the idea that God’s connection to the material world is real, intimate, and sustaining, but not collapsing. This is where the trinitarian imagination becomes central. 

Returning to the Trinity 

In the trinitarian view, the relationship between God and the world is neither separation nor fusion. It is dynamic connection across difference. Jesus, a material being who eats, suffers, and dies, is “constantly led by the Spirit.” And yet the Spirit is not material; the two are not identical. 

This, Christian says, is the heart of the matter: “God is distinct from the material world, but connected.” 

The incarnation—God becoming human in the person of Jesus—shows that matter is not something to be escaped or overcome. “From the trinitarian model,” he says, “the world is so good that Jesus takes on the material, and when he dies he takes it with him to heaven. He uplifts the material world.” 

Where dualism makes nature as the “other” to be used, the trinitarian model affirms both the distinctiveness and the dignity of the natural world. This, Christian believes, is Christianity’s forgotten gift to ecological thought. 

Why India matters 

Christian’s perspective is shaped powerfully by his Indian experience, where relationships and identities operate under a very different logic from Western individuality. 

He uses the example of a child’s bedroom. In the West, he notes, individuality is so prized that “when a child is born, a room is prepared for him, because they are distinct. You are unique.” But in many Indian contexts, the idea is baffling. “Why would you push a child out of the room when he is born?” he asks. “Sometimes the child is in the room until they are 8 or 10. You are one of us, you are like me, so I want to connect with you.” 

This difference, he says, matters for theology. Western theology often imagines God as a kind of ultimate individual, separate from the world. But Indian relational thought expects connection, interdependence, mingling. “Western is: you are unlike me, so I want to connect with you. Indian is: you are like me, so I want to connect with you.” 

Gunton’s trinitarian vision, Christian suggests, still carries traces of Western distance. It meets some needs but not others. “He doesn’t meet the longing of ecotheologians,” Christian says, “because where is the material connection?” The challenge, to his mind, is to articulate a trinitarian theology that is both faithful to Christian tradition and resonant with Indian relational sensibilities. 

“In Christ,” he insists, “God has become one of us and has materially connected to us.” 

Ecology, justice, and the problem with idealism 

Though it didn't start that way, the implications of Christian's work for the field of ecological ethics are clear. 

Ecotheologians and liberation theologians, he says, are right to critique dualism. When human beings imagine themselves above nature, environmental destruction often follows. When powerful states build dams, displacing poor communities, “this is a result of dualistic thinking; they are right about that.” 

But Christian argues that many ecotheologians misread the social landscape, especially in India. Too often, their emphasis falls on preserving nature at all costs—an idea that resonates strongly in Western environmentalism but not necessarily among marginalised communities who live with scarcity. 

“They assume that marginalised communities hold on to the idea that science is evil,” he says. “But this is not the case.” Dalit thinkers, for example, often express a desire for science, technology and development. What they lack is not pristine nature but food, housing, infrastructure. Christian recalls the pointed title of one essay: Why Do Dalits Hate Environmentalism? 

Preserving nature, he says, “is a very Western understanding.” For many Dalits, forests and rivers are not romantic symbols of spiritual wholeness but sites of daily struggle. The Ganges is a case in point. Viewed as holy, it is simultaneously “the most polluted” of rivers. Christian argues that idealised non-interference—“We do not interfere with nature”—can produce neglect rather than care. “It floods every year,” he notes, “because no one cares to intervene.” 

In this sense, the Western ecotheologian’s idealisation of nature has an unexpected parallel with the sacred status of the Ganges: in both cases, calling something holy can be a way of avoiding responsibility. The rhetoric of reverence becomes a substitute for the work of stewardship. The world does not need more shrines, Christian suggests—it needs care. 

Toward a trinitarian ethic 

Christian’s alternative is a trinitarian approach that views nature as deeply connected to God but not identical with God. This avoids collapsing all difference into unity while resisting the impulse to treat nature as a mere resource. It allows for care without romanticism, stewardship without domination. 

Nature, he insists, is part of the relational fabric of creation: sacred because God dwells with it, but not divine in itself. Humans can study nature, shape it, and work with it—without abusing science and without worshipping nature as a substitute deity. 

The goal is a conceptual space where ecologists, theologians, scientists, and marginalised communities can enter the same conversation without talking past one another. 

Searching for a new language 

Christian believes that new theological work is needed—a new vocabulary capable of engaging both traditional Christian insights and the concerns of modern ecology, liberation movements and interreligious dialogue. 

This quest for new language takes him back to the problem he identified earlier: dualism has survived in Christian thought largely because of the linguistic categories inherited from Greek philosophy. If the language formed the problem, he argues, language may be key to solving it. 

Words like “sacred,” “holy,” and even “Mother Nature” need to be re-examined. “Nature is holy—what do we mean by this?” he asks. “Mother Nature—what do we mean by that?” 

He believes Christians should continue using these words, but with far greater care: “The world is sacred, God comes down to it often; finally he becomes part of material nature and takes it into eternity with him.” 

It’s a striking image: not nature fleeing toward spirit, nor spirit dissolving into nature, but a world held open by a God who refuses both separation and collapse—who insists on connection without erasure. 

A different way of seeing 

Christian’s vision is neither a wholesale rejection of Western theology nor a romantic embrace of Eastern holism. It is something more complex: an attempt to hold together distinct traditions in a way that honours their differences. 

And this, he believes, is precisely the sort of thinking our ecological moment demands. Not an abstract system. Not a perfect solution. But a model that respects nature while refusing to romanticise it, that encourages scientific inquiry while resisting domination, that honours human need while insisting on reverence. 

In a world increasingly shaped by crisis, perhaps the most radical offering of the trinitarian imagination is this: difference need not mean division. God is not distant, yet not identical with the world. And if that is true, then perhaps there is still hope for a more just, more sustainable, more honest relationship with the Earth we call home.