Sermons

’Subdue The Earth and Have Dominion’?

Roderic P. Frohman                                Third Presbyterian Church  October 17, 2004                                  Genesis 1:28

The story is so very familiar, we have known this story since our childhood, and how God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day and called it all good. A little less familiar, but nevertheless a crucial part of the story, is the command of God to Adam and Eve to exercise dominion over the earth.

God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’

“Subdue?” “Have dominion?” From this ancient legend there is a common understanding of a hierarchy in which humankind stands at the pinnacle of creation. That has gotten us into a whole lot of trouble. We have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of this dominion probably because we do not know the original context of the story.

The original context of the seven-day creation story is a “polemic against the sacralization of nature, and the enslavement of humanity.” (Foster R. McCurley, Ed. Proclamation Commentaries: The Old Testament Witnesses for Preaching; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, c. 1979 Fortress Press). “Sacralization of nature” means to make nature sacred. That is, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, sunny days and mild nights are the acts of God, the deeds of God indicating God’s anger or pleasure with humanity, or imitations of life in the heavens, among the deities of the divine pantheon.

A polemic is an aggressive attack on or refutation of the opinions or principles of another. But is this nice creation story a polemic? Yes. The original tellers of this creation story were Jewish clergy—priests who were captive exiles in Babylon. It is a story told against the culture of their Mesopotamian masters.

Last Sunday John Wilkinson preached about Jeremiah, the sixth century BCE prophet who wrote to the same exiles in Babylon to “seek the welfare of the city.” They did. And much more.

As you may remember, the great kingdoms of David and Solomon that began about 1000 BCE split into two frequently warring factions, a North, and a South. The Northern Kingdom was captured and the people taken into captivity about 721 BCE and became the so-called “ten lost tribes of Israel.” The Southern Kingdom, headquartered in Jerusalem, hung onto Jewish traditions for another 136 years but was eventually overrun by the Babylonian dynasty of Nebuchadnezzar in 585 BCE. The economic, religious and intellectual elite of Jerusalem were taken in chains to Babylon

When the Jewish exiles arrived in Ancient Babylon in 585 BCE (now in ruins just 40 miles south of modern day Baghdad) King Nebuchadnezzar, the conqueror of Jerusalem, had constructed there an astonishing array of temples, streets, palaces, and ziggurats, or towers of Babel. He diverted the Euphrates River into a grid of rivers and canals and constructed the Hanging (or terraced) Gardens of Babylon. It was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

But there were some “wild facts;” there were some anomalies, about these technological accomplishments, not the least of which was, the Jews were still second class citizens far from home.

This was not lost on the psalmist, who wrote in Psalm 137, By the rivers of Babylon— we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung our harps. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, "Sing to us one of the songs of Zion!"

And sing they did. As a matter of fact a lot of singing. When the captivity was over and the Jews were permitted to go back to Jerusalem, these priests of the Babylonian exile had edited hundreds of poems into hymnbook for the second Temple that they eventually re-built back in Jerusalem. We call this “hymnbook of the second Temple,” the Psalms.

But they also developed prose theological stories. They took the three predominant streams of Jewish theological tradition of the court narratives of David and Solomon (called the J document), the northern tradition around Hosea and the 8th century BCE prophets, E, and the Deuteronomic reform of the boy-king Josiah, D, and added their own priestly tradition, P. They in fact rewrote, or more accurately re-edited, (redacted) the whole Torah, and inserted into the books of Moses a new understanding of what it meant to be a believer in one sovereign God in the midst of the polytheism of pagan lands. The style of the priestly editors can be seen in lists, rules, genealogies and symmetrically-designed stories one of which is the seven-day creation story, important enough to become the first chapter of the Bible.

Why was a creation story that important? An understanding of the particular design of creation leads to understanding the human role in that design. But more immediately, the Babylonians had their own competing creation legend. That story was called the “Enuma Elish.”

This Babylonian creation story was not just told, but acted out in a twelve-day grand, annual, ritual parade. It was the re-enactment of the god Marduk’s bloody, sexual combat victory over the female monster goddess of chaos, Tiamat. This legend portrayed human beings, as created out of the blood of one of Taimat’s slain generals, and were made to be “savage” to do the work of the gods so that the gods might “be at ease.” In this twelve-day Festival of Nissan, human beings, acting the part of the protagonists of the legends, could be wounded and killed in a public sacred marriage ritual. The ancient Babylonians understood that in this mating battle, creation itself was taking place and ensuring the continuation of biological, agricultural and political life for another year. In short, the Babylonian creation legend was an X-rated story of sex and violence in which humanity, the natural order and the political order was validated for the pleasure and consumption of the gods.

Thus, it is no accident that the priests of the exile, the authors of the seven-day creation story, and the collectors and composers of the Psalms, would also say in Psalm 19, "the heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” The contrast is illustrated by the significant difference between Joseph Hayden’s Creation Oratorio and Verdi’s Opera Nabucco, the story of Nebuchadnezzar.

As counter testimony the priests of the exile understood creation as God’s “partner” (Brueggemann, Walter, Theology of the Old Testament, c. 1997 Fortress, p. 528) and humanity as morally responsible before God for the maintenance of creation. In the ancient world, where forces outside and beyond the control of humans bore down from all sides and was the province of gods and goddesses; this counter testimony was an extraordinary affirmation of human agency and freedom. (Larry L. Rasmussen, Earth Community Earth Ethics, c. 1996, Orbis, Maryknoll, NY, p. 249 This book is the winner of the 1997 Louisville Grawemeyer Award.)

The priests taught that the creation itself is not sacred. God is not in the trees and soil. “Creation, [is] the network of living organisms that provides a viable context and home for the human community, [it] is an outcome of God’s generous, sovereign freedom.” God “authorized in the biosphere the inscrutable force of generosity so that the earth can sustain all its members. Thus the earth has within itself the carrying capacity for sustenance, nurture, and regeneration. This capacity for generosity is no human monopoly, it is assured that every genus and species of creation can ‘bring forth’ according to its kind.” (Brueggemann, Ibid.)

So, the original meaning of human supervision was not dominion (radah in Hebrew) in the modern sense of mastery and control. Rather humans in the Hebrew story are pictured as trustees—that is a good word, even a Presbyterian word, trustees--or stewards of the earth. Further, the word kabas in Hebrew is poorly translated into English as subdue. A more accurate translation would be “tiller, or keeper of the earth,” gardener. (The New Interpreters Bible, Vol. 1 p. 346, c. 1994 Nashville, Abingdon). The core of meaning of this human dominion is that while all living things on earth have some human reference and use, the proper human attitude is one of restraint, humility and even noninterference, except for matters of necessity. In fact the modern capacity to think of humans apart from the rest of nature is largely lost to the ancient Hebrews because Biblical Hebrew has no word for “nature” as a realm separate from humans. The biblical angle here is not homocentric, nor biocentric, but theocentric. “Dominion,” suggests Jewish scholar Michael Lerner, is never exegeted by the rabbis as a license for exploitative subjugation. Humans are the guardians of the earth. (Rasmussen p. 231)

But how did things go wrong? How did the steward become the exploiter? Actually it is a confluence of ideology and demographics. At the time of Jesus the population of the entire world was less than that of the US, 200 million. (USA is now 284 million) By the time Columbus circled the globe, it was half a billion. In 1800 it was one billion. (NY Times graph, May 9, 1992) As a growing population worked its way through the Enlightenment, the Protestant Reformation and eventually the industrial revolution, a number of champions of domination emerged. Sir Francis Bacon claimed [The reader should note the gender specific words, grist for a sermon in an of itself.] that through scientific technology, ‘nature could be dissected and forced out of her natural state and squeezed and molded so that she takes orders from man and works under his authority;’ or, he also said, the supreme human vocation is to “establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe.” (Rasmussen p. 87) René Descartes suggested that we can “render ourselves masters and possessors of nature.” (Ibid.) The Protestant reformers were fish in this epistemological ocean. They focused faith’s concentration on the knowledge of God and of self—a revolutionary idea in its own right—in such a way it as to push aside or ignore consideration of the earth itself as a configuration of nature. (Rasmussen p. 190)

And to complicate matters, economists followed suit. Herman Daly formerly senior economist at the World Bank suggests, modern economic thought, including that of Karl Marx, has “dropped [the ideas] of nature and community from its calculations,” and substituted an “anthropocentric [Cartesian] dualism” in which land is separated from community for private consumption and private capital gain which, in turn, has lead to the “destruction of human community in economic practice.” (Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, For The Common Good, Redirecting the Economy Toward Community and a Sustainable Future, c. 1994, Boston, Beacon Press, p. 190.)

So whether it came from philosophers or theologians or economists, human subjectivity and individual human consciousness became the place of encounter with God. Nature became the inexhaustible storehouse of wealth and the assumed, silent stage or constant backdrop for the human drama. Humans became environmentally autistic. This subject-object split has, with some exception, (John Cobb and “process” theologians) continued into modern times.

There is no doubt, this ideology was very productive. Industrialization’s mighty victories and extensive benefits have been won precisely through alienation from nature. And the victories have been the greatest since the end of WW II. From 1947 to 1973 we were in a golden age of economic growth. But the consequences of that growth are no longer golden. (Eric Hobsbawm, A History of the World, 1914 – 1991, c. 1994, NY, Random House) We have rising accumulations of wastes and pollutants, falling stocks of water, soils and forests, capital and labor devoted to exploitation of deeper, distant or diluted resources. We have a deterioration of long-lived urban infrastructure, reduced investment in human resources: education, health care, shelter. We have more hoarding, more refugees and a greater “haves” to “have-nots” economic gap. We are in a numbers game that defies current economic globalization theory. Remember in 1800 the world population was 1 billion. In 1950 it was 2 billion. In my life time world population has tripled. It is now 6.4 billion. (Population Reference Bureau http://www.prb.org/) If I live to achieve my mother’s, age, 99, (2045) I will see the world’s population at 10 billion. We are now in an era of un-economic growth that impoverishes more than a growth economy can enrich.

Here is the basic anomaly, the basic “wild fact” of the 21st century: The World Watch Institute reports that the human “balance of use” with the environment is now 126%. We are taking out more than the environment can replenish and some are taking more than their share. “If everyone in the world lived like [Rod Frohman] the average [North] American, we’d need the resources of at least five earths to support us.” (Flavin, Christopher, President of “World Watch Institute,” June 2003 solicitation letter to members.) We have over-reached the generous carrying capacity of the planet.

I am afraid that Rachel Carson, writing 40 years ago, could finally be right. I am afraid, and some days I am VERY afraid, that my grandchildren will someday encounter a “silent spring.” The policies of “dominion” and “subdue”, as these policies have been practiced since the industrial revolution, must give way.

One’s first reaction is to throw out the baby with the bath water and to abandon biblical categories. And from time to time I consider such. After all, the Bible has been used to defend slavery, the subjugation of women, and homophobia. But there are voices from the scripture, which cry out to me, especially the words of St. Paul in today’s first lesson, “we know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains—waiting for redemption.” (Romans 8:22 and 24) Why does God redeem? Because life and blessing are not yet what they might be and not yet available to all. The Bible’s moral trajectory is not complete. The Biblical object of redemption is to free the whole creation from its “groaning.” Redemption’s ethic is an earth ethic that builds a sustainable earth community for creation’s well being without a return to Eden, and without utopias, and golden ages to which to aspire. (Rasmussen p 256)

So “creation became a crucial claim of Israel's faith in exile [where scholars commonly date the seven-day creation story.] This setting for creation of faith suggests that affirmation of creation as an ordered, reliable arena of generosity is a treasured counter testimony to the disordered experience of chaos in exile. If this critical judgment is accepted, creation and then is an enactment done in worship, in order to resist the negation of the world of exile. As a consequence, creation is not to be understood as just a theory or as an intellectual, speculative notion but as a concrete life-or-death discipline and practice whereby the peculiar claims of God were mediated in and to Israel.” (Brueggemann) Ibid. p. 533)

This sustainable earth community understood by the priests of the Exile was not limited to the elite who lived in Babylon’s hanging gardens and houseboats. By virtue of the act of developing their counter testimony to the paganism of the Babylonian legends, “Israel bears witness to the awareness that there is alive in the world a force that is counter to the world of God, a force that seeks to negate and nullify the world as secure place of blessing.” (Brueggemann Ibid. p. 534)

Therefore, in Hebrew—and Christian—creation theology there is a linkage of social equity and ecology. This linkage is the Bible’s DNA, the double helix of Biblical theology. The absence of this linkage in Babylonian life was precisely the rub. The God who created the universe and sustains it from day to day is the same power who champions the powerless. (Psalm 77) A linkage of land and society means, if people are faithful to God's moral universe and thereby create a just social order then the land will yield its produce in abundance. (Leviticus 26 and Hosea 4) But if they re-create the oppression they have known and stray from God’s commands, then the ecological catastrophe will follow. The liberating God was the sovereign creator of the universe. (Rasmussen, p. 253)

The linkage means that creation is a verb, not a noun, that sin is original but not terminal, that my neighbor is also my great grand child and that compassion and forgiveness lead to the healing of the earth

But none of this Biblical DNA can happen without oxygen and hydrogen.

So while I am not willing to throw out the Bible’s story of origin, in order to move to the earth’s redemption I must ADD science’s story of origin, because that story can also be an earth ethic concerned with community. Indeed Walt Whitman understood this community when he said, “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars." The atoms in the grass, and all atoms everywhere, our bodies included, were born in the supernova explosions that birthed the stars. Everything is thus radically related from the very beginning. The createds are all relateds. When we gaze at the Southern Cross, Orion, or the Big Dipper, or the gnat on our arm, the flower in our garden, or the food on our plate, we are gazing at a neighbor who shares with us what is most basic of all—common matter as ancient and venerable as time and space themselves. The most basic functions of cells are the same in all life forms. The DNA molecule specifies the characteristics of all living organisms, from bacteria through human beings. The reason is remarkable: all life forms apparently share the same ancestor. We probably all emerged from an ancient single-celled being. And, as Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) reminds me, my backyard is a seething laboratory of these cells. One square foot of topsoil one inch high has an average of 1,356 living creatures including: 865 mites, 265 springtails, 22 millipedes, 19 adult beetles, millions of fungi and two billion bacteria. (Rasmussen p. 263) And our planet is one tiny cell in the cosmos of billions and billions of galaxies.

We are all varied forms of stardust. Stardust. “From stardust you have come and to stardust you shall return.” Both science and scripture call us to be humble stewards, trustees, cultivators of the dust, the dirt.

Yes, Jeremiah did write to the exiles, and you know what, they wrote back. In their story the priests of the Exile remind us, the Hebrew word for dirt is the feminine noun, ‘adamah, or in English, Adam. ‘Adamah’s partner is ‘hava, or living, or in English, Eve. Adam and Eve signify soil and life. And in that ancient creation story Adam and Eve are to cultivate the earth for God, which of course is the same thing as cultivating themselves.