CREATION DOMINION THEOLOGY
Humans have ‘dominion’ (caring
responsibility) for other living creatures
The idea of dominion, an enormously
influential idea historically and variously interpreted over the centuries, is
what more than anything else has tempted people who knew the text to forget
their own creatureliness, to set themselves over the rest of creation as though
they did not belong to it but could do as they wished with it, even remake it
to their own design.
But this is only possible if we take it
out of its biblical context –, when we have learned a great many other things
from the Bible about the relationship of humans to other creatures.
Dominion is a role within creation, not over it. Other creatures are first and foremost our fellow-creatures, and only when we appreciate them as such can we properly exercise the distinctive role that the Genesis creation narrative gives us in relation to other creatures. It is not the only way we relate to other creatures, but it is a distinctive one.
There is no need here to labour the
point that the dominion should be understood as a role of caring
responsibility, not exploitation, because this is now widely agreed. The point
I do wish to labour is that it is a responsibility for fellow-creatures.
Since Genesis depicts it as a kind of royal function, the rule of a king over
others, it is worth recalling the only passage in the law of Moses that refers
to the role of the king in Israel (Deut. 17:14–20). There it is emphasized that
the king is one among his brothers and sisters, his fellow-Israelites, and
should not forget it, should not accumulate wealth or arms or indulge in any of
the ways kings usually exalt themselves above their subjects.
Only if they remember their fundamental
solidarity with their people will kings be able to rule truly for the benefit
of their people. Similarly, only when humans remember their fundamental
solidarity with their fellow-creatures will they be able to exercise their
distinctive authority within creation for the benefit of other creatures.
Finally, in our present context it is
very well worth pondering the fact that the most obvious example Genesis itself
provides of the exercise of the dominion is Noah’s preservation of all the
species of earth in the ark.
Dominion begins from appreciating God’s valuation of his creation
A significant aspect of the Genesis 1
six-day creation account is that before we humans read of our responsibility
for other living creatures we are taken through a narrative of creation that
stresses God’s delight in each stage of his work. We are invited to share God’s
appreciation of his creation before we learn of our distinctive role within it.
It follows, surely, that our approach to
exercising dominion should be rooted in that fundamental appreciation of the
created world as God has made it. We may then be less inclined to spoil it in
our attempts to reshape it.
Dominion is to be exercised in letting be just as much as in intervention
Over the centuries people got used to
thinking of the human dominion over other creatures as activity. It got to the
point in the modern period where the human task came to be conceived as
constant, ongoing activity to transform the world into one that would suit us
much better than the natural world does. The result is that in fact there is
little if any part of the planet that has not been to some extent affected by
human activity, and we have all too slowly woken up to the fact that there is a
lot we would really like to preserve as it is, because the natural world has
value that does not require our constant interference to improve it.
In this situation it is vital that we re-conceive the Genesis dominion as a matter of letting creation be, at least as much as it is a matter of intervention. In fact, this aspect is really rather clear in Scripture itself if we consider those parts of the law of Moses that prescribe Israel’s ways of relating to the land of Israel and its other living creatures. We should recall the sabbatical institutions – the weekly Sabbath, when no work was to be done, even by domestic animals, and the Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee, when the land was to be left fallow and not farmed.
In the Sabbatical Year, fields,
vineyards and orchards were to be left to rest, the produce not gathered, so
that ‘the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may
eat’ (Exod. 23:11; cf. Lev. 25:7). Even within the cultivated part of the land
of Israel, wild animals are expected to be able to live. We could see this as a
kind of symbol of respect for wild nature, reminding both ancient Israel and
ourselves that dominion includes letting nature be itself.
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