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2. Dominion Interpreted – a Historical Account Introduction In a hugely influential passage of Scripture, Genesis 1:28 speaks of a ‘dominion’ (the most usual English translation) over other living creatures given by God to humans at their creation. In Genesis itself, it is clear that humans, while given a special status and responsibility for other creatures, are themselves creatures alongside their fellow-creatures . Their ‘dominion’ is within the created order, not, like God’s, transcendent above it. Distinguished from their fellow-creatures in some respects, they are also like them in many respects. A crucial issue that will be highlighted in our exploration here of the history of interpretation of this Genesis text is the extent to which interpreters have retained a sense of the horizontal relationship of humans with their fellow-creatures along with the vertical relationship of dominion that sets them in some sense above other creatures on earth. The loss of the horizontal relationship, in effect treating humans as gods in relation to the world, was, I shall argue, probably the most fateful development in Christian attitudes to the non-human creation. Only with this development did interpretation of Genesis 1:28 take its place in the ideology of aggressive domination of nature that has characterized the modern west. The word ‘dominion’ easily enough suggests the charge of domination , i.e. of exploitative power by which humans have treated the rest of nature, animate and inanimate, as no more than a resource for human use and material for humans to fashion into whatever kind of world they might prefer to the existing one. Such an attitude has undoubtedly characterized the modern west, and has been essential to the course that the modern scientific and technological enterprise has taken, with vast implications in the economic sphere. It could well be seen as the ideological root of the ecological crisis of recent decades, and those who have tried to pin a major share of responsibility for our contemporary ecological problems on the western Christian tradition (with or without its Israelite and Jewish roots) have often focused especially on the notion of human dominion over nature given in Genesis 1. In this they have followed the lead of the celebrated article, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, by the medieval historian (a specialist in the history of medieval technology) Lynn White, Jr, first published in 1967 and reprinted a number of times since then,1 hugely influential2 and still so in spite of the many attempts to refute its central thesis.3 It is a very brief article, bursting with confident and ill-substantiated generalizations that cry out for more detailed historical investigation. Yet the very simplicity of its provocative thesis has earned it a great deal of attention and has proved a useful stimulus to some of the more detailed historical study that needs to be done4 if the thesis is to be accepted, rejected or qualified . Dominion Interpreted – a Historical Account 15 1 Lynn White, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science 155 (1967): pp. 1203-7; reprinted in Western Man and Environmental Ethics (ed. Ian G. Barbour; Reading, Massachusetts/London/Ontario: Addison-Wesley, 1973), pp. 18–30; The Care of Creation (ed R.J. Berry; Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2000), pp. 31–42. 2 Although White has subsequently contributed little more to the debate, he is ‘the most cited author in the field of the eco-theological discussion’, according to H. Baranzke and H. Lamberty-Zielinski, ‘Lynn White und das dominium terrae (Gen 1,28b): Ein Beitrag zu einer doppelten Wirkungsgeschichte’, BN 76 (1995): p. 56. On the influence of White’s article in solidifying the view of many environmentalists that the Judeo-Christian religious tradition is the enemy, see the interesting autobiographical comments by Max Oelschlaeger, Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental Crisis (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1994): pp. 22–7. For White’s own later contributions, see Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989): p. 95. 3 E.g. Bill McKibben, The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994): pp. 34–5. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (2nd edn; Cambridge: CUP, 1994): pp. 27–31, still follows White, even though in his The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and Ecological Imagination (New York/Oxford: OUP, 1993): pp. 207–19, he argued that White’s thesis...

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