Creation and the Cross: The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril

In this fresh creative approach to theology, Elizabeth Johnson asks how we can understand cosmic redemption in a time of advancing ecological devastation. In effect, how can we extend the core Christian belief in salvation to include all created beings? Immediately this question runs into a formidable obstacle: the idea that Jesus’s death on the cross was required as atonement for human sin—a theology laid out by the eleventh-century theologian St. Anselm.

Constructing her argument (like An...