Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters

9. On Keeping the Earth: How Am I to Relate to the Rest of Creation?

221 How Am I to Relate to the Rest of Creation? On Keeping the Earth 9 While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation. Maya Angelou 1 Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth! Henry David Thoreau 2 In chapter 8 we have seen that the question of Cain—“Am I my brother’s keeper?”—is answered by biblical faith in the affirmative. Yes, I am my brother’s keeper. I am indeed to love my neighbor. But what about the rest of creation? Am I to love it too? Do I have duties and responsibilities toward it, of the kind that I have toward my fellow humans beings? I once saw a cartoon in which an ape in a zoo is looking out through the bars of his enclosure at the person preparing his food and thinking, “Am I my keeper’s brother?” What is the answer to that question, and does it change if the ape is not in captivity? In short, how am I to relate to the rest of creation? 222 Seriously Dangerous Religion I have already articulated the beginnings of a response in chapters 2 and 4, where I discussed, first, the nature of the world in general and, second, the nature of human beings in particular. Creation, we recall, is a temple-cosmos, and human beings are the divine images who are supposed to look after it. Their task is to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock , over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground . . . [to] be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” (Genesis 1:26, 28) Every human being, made in God’s image, embodies God’s presence in his temple-cosmos and participates in his rule there. In Genesis 2, in fact, the natural world is conceived of as coming into being only along with human beings, without whom it cannot function. This dependence runs in both directions, for the human being is one with creation in being created; she is one of the creatures into whose nostrils God has “breathed . . . the breath of life” so that she becomes “a living being” (2:7). This same term (a living being) is used of the sea creatures (1:20) and the land animals and birds (2:19), and in Genesis 7:22 the flood destroys everything that has “the breath of life in its nostrils.” The solidarity of this particular “god” (the human being) with the rest of creation is thus clear. This particular image of God is thoroughly terrestrial—a creature through and through, sharing “the breath of life” with other animate beings. Yet it remains a person who is like God in ways that other creatures are not. This double-sided presentation of the human being in Genesis 1–2 as both “god” and creature, I have affirmed—both as part of creation and yet “over” it—is characteristic of the rest of the Old Testament also. We must now explore this presentation further. A Common Life We begin with texts that emphasize the oneness of human beings with the rest of creation. In Genesis 1–2, when God’s creation is first described, we read that the earth is at first “formless and empty” (Genesis 1:2). God provides both form, giving the cosmos a particular structure and shape, and content, making an empty place full of life. All the creatures that fill this new holy space are said in Genesis 1 (in a recurring refrain) to have been created “according to their kinds”—distinct On Keeping the EArth 223 from each other, in an ordered environment. A God-given dignity, then, is already implied of each individual member of the various families of creation—a dignity that is not dependent upon human beings, even though they have their own role to play within the cosmos. All creatures are God’s creatures, whatever their “kinds.” Indeed, human beings are resolutely part of the creation in Genesis 1. They do not have a day of creation to themselves but instead share the sixth day with the other land creatures. In Genesis 1, then, the emphasis lies on the human commonality...