Love God, Love God's Creation

If we love God we'll  take care of God's creation

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth", or so the first verse of the Bible is often translated and this has been the dominant rendering of Genesis 1:1 since the Greek Septuagint, the first major translation of the Hebrew Bible (into Greek), produced by Jewish scholars in the third century BC.  There is now some debate as to whether this is the best way to understand precisely what the original words would have meant to their first audience, but that isn't relevant here.

If all the Christians and Jews the world over believe God made our world, whether they believe in a literal six day creation or that there was a certain amount of divine intervention in the Big Bang and the formation of our Earth, I would also expect them to believe our world is a pretty special place and so we should all be doing our best to look after it.

As writer Veronica Zundel tweeted recently,

"God's chief interest in life is not religion, but the world, and especially (but not exclusively) human beings."

If Jews and Christians alike believe they are to love the LORD their God with all their heart, all their being and all their resources I'd expect them to be making a real effort to care for every part of the natural world to express their love for the God they believe brought it into being. Some are.

However, for a very long time most Christians seemed to take more notice of another verse in the opening chapter of the Bible, namely Genesis 1:26.

The King James Bible translates the verse thus:

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

For a long time people understood "dominion" to mean domination and some people still do today.

The Complete Jewish Bible translates it explicitly as allowing human beings to rule over all the earth and every living creature.

'Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, in the likeness of ourselves; and let them rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the animals, and over all the earth, and over every crawling creature that crawls on the earth.”'

However, the idea of dominating the natural world comes from the Greco-Roman worldview, which has influenced the European way of thinking for centuries.  In the Hebrew Bible there are many references to a benign ruler who runs his kingdom for the benefit of everyone living in it, not just so he can get rich and powerful and live in luxury.

It was about 18 years ago that I started to realise that what I'd been told was the only true understanding of what it meant to be a Christian was based on an interpretation of the Bible that was disputed by many other Christians. At that point I began investigating how other Christians understood the Bible and what they considered important to the Christian life. Somewhere along the way I started to read books on Christian theology, making some exciting discoveries along the way.

One of my discoveries was that most mainstream Bible scholars now believe that Genesis was written during the Babylonian Exile. The people who wrote it down and the people who first sung or chanted Genesis One and other portions  as liturgy would have been Hebrew-speaking captives living as slaves in Babylonia from 598/7 BCE to 538 BCE. Genesis chapter one may well have been written to challenge the idea that human rulers could treat their fellow human beings as they liked. The words of the very next verse challenge the Babylonian creation myth that said human beings were merely slaves of the gods, who must obey every whim of the gods' representative on Earth, the Babylonian king. "No!" these Hebrew-speaking captives said, "we were not made slaves to the gods, we were made in the very likeness of our God, our women as well as our men".

"So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them." - Genesis 1:27 (NRSV)

As Walter Wink puts it "Genesis 1 was developed in exile as an answering rebuke to the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish. In the Babylonian myth, human beings are created from the blood of a murdered god in order to serve the gods. Genesis 1 asserts, to the contrary, that all creation is good and that human beings are created in God's image.” (Walter Wink, "The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man", pg 28)

The authors of the first parts of the Bible to be written down didn't thinking rulers should be allowed to dominate. The idea of the ruler as a Good Shepherd appears in other parts of the Bible and was picked up by some early Christian writers who saw Jesus as a Good Shepherd. The idea of the Kingdom of God, or of Heaven, which features in some of the gospels originates in the Hebrew Bible and refers to a rule where all may prosper and live in peace.

In his book 'The Earth Under Threat: A Christian Perspective', Ghillean Prance says

"Dominion, a word which has often been misunderstood, implies caretaking to act as stewards of God's own purposes. It does not, in its biblical sense, imply the establishment of a competing reign, which is what the fall has led to. Dominion is not domination without justice, but rather responsible rule that does not exploit its charges. God gave instructions to share the earth's vegetation with other creatures." (See Genesis 1:29-30)

So, Genesis 1:26 gives no one carte blanche to abuse the natural world and to use the Earth's resources in a wanton fashion giving no thought to the needs of other people alive today or of future generations.

If we love God, we will care and respect the world we say we believe God created in some way.  If we love God we will care and respect the millions of people we share our planet with who we also believe were created by the  very same God we say we love.

Jesus taught his disciples that the second most important commandment was that we are to love our neighbours as ourselves, just as if they are part of our own family, which they are if we believe God to be our Father and the Father of all humankind.

• So for Christians especially, but also for Jews, the natural world is to be looked after because we believe it is precious to the God we believe created it and say we love.
• Moreover the implication is that we hold the Earth's resources in trust for future generations, to be used equally by every person alive when we really need them, but not to be squandered nor for anyone to take more than his or her fair share.

If you live by these two principles, what difference does it make to your life?